6:13 am: Up. No idea what time we slept, 9:30-10:30? Watched “That ‘70s Show”, “Will & Grace”, and some Evanescence video before sleeping. Woke up at 3:30, Ross snores (he warned us), and the room next door, with whom we share a window, got an audible wake up call and turned their lights on and had the usual water running noises. Now in search of coffee.

6:39 am: Mmmmmm, coffee, with sugar, tried the creamer but more coffee came out. Now I’m hungry. I walked through the hotel gardens: incidental courtyards with taro, antler ferns, philodendrons, citrus trees, heliconias, ginger, orchids, ferns, butterflies, spiders, hummingbirds, and what Dick identified as a “Blue-gray tanager”. Warm cloudy day, bit of rain, watching Spanish Discovery Channel back in room: a frog jumped over a snake, the snake struck out and missed, then the frog did it again, just for kicks, and was eaten.

8:10 am: Loading the bus, watching traffic. Breakfast was a “westernized” (according to seasoned Costa Rica veteran Daryl) Gallo Pinto – the unofficial national dish of rice and beans (eaten three times a day every day). We also had white pineapple, potatoes, papaya, watermelon and sweet but dry pastries. I had another cup of coffee. All our stuff is on the bus now; I have a bottle of San José tap water that tastes like it came from a swimming pool. (It was the last potable water for our tender Canadian digestive tracts until we start on the boiled stuff at the research station.) In daylight, I can see that the outside of the hotel is surrounded by loops of razor wire. There’s a billboard across the street that says “Jesu Christo nombre que es sobre todo nombre”. (Something about Jesus being all of something to do with numbers?) Hey, I understood when the driver asked for the large bags first in Spanish, congratulate me. There’s a really fat dachshund ambling along the street right now. The gutters are ridiculously high here, (I guess torrential rains happen). So far we’ve lost one pair of binoculars.

8:23 am: On the bus (a small, but relatively new cream-coloured charter with a sticker on the back that says “Chicken Tours”). Cinquo horas to our destination (a small village in the Northwest of the country, from which we’ll hike to the Pitilla research station). The driver scared everyone into a last minute bathroom break. “Vamanos” by 8:25. Beaded seat covers appear to be popular. All the cars here are Japanese. Dick’s telling snake stories; like how you can’t see them even if you know where they are: “I gave up looking, only to find out it was right beside me”. Hyundai, Toyota, Hyundai. There are piles of garbage along the sidewalks and men out in traffic selling toys like enterprising squeegee kids. There’s an entire hedge of orange hibiscus blooming along the road, the local flora is like houseplants gone wild.

8:36 am: The buildings are mint green, teal, peach, rust, and royal blue, with corrugated tin everywhere. Daewoo, Volkswagen makes the buses, Mercedes makes the trucks. Machismo on the face and in the stance of every guy driving or walking down the street. “Buscando a Nemo.” Last night we passed four McDonalds between the airport and the hotel, the drive-thru is called the “Auto-Mac”. One man strung up a display of hammocks for sale on a traffic island, intentionally punning perhaps; does that even work in Spanish? I’ve seen four hummingbirds already this morning. The smell is of burning diesel, fried plantains, and a note of garbage. Black Vultures (Dick’s ID) are circling to our left, they hold their wings out straight, level with their bodies. (Turkey vultures have some dihedral, their wings held up a bit, forming a V shape, like pigeons).
    Japanese sedans with car-kit spoilers filled with young Ticos; Jesus fish; people selling lottery tickets on the highway; chartreuse butterflies; produce stands on the shoulder (I see chayote squash), “Se Vende”; one tomato plant strung up growing out of a roadside ditch. Green everywhere; valleys and hills topped with powerlines; coffee plantations; fields of sugarcane.
    The driver, Marvin (which becomes “mar-BAN”) sits in khaki shorts, a white t-shirt, and a baseball cap with one hand on the transmission, one on the wheel. Diane sits sideways on a bench looking out the window opposite with a green “Vancouver” baseball cap and a hand underneath her chin. Dick has a notebook and a field guide to “Birds of Costa Rica” on his lap and dispenses knowledge as the landscape suggests. I’ve got a cool breeze, my journal, and a camera around my neck, what more do I need?
    (We’re heading northwest on the Inter-American highway, paved on our stretch, with potholes, mostly two-lane, crossing Costa Rica as it winds from Mexico to Panama.) We pass a valley filled with Banana plants and Angel’s Trumpets, containing a bridge from which you can bungee jump. Decorating buildings are garlands made of interlocked plastic flowers, blue, mint green, and peach, that twirl in the wind. I’ve got hangnails like crazy (and no nail clippers), and a hole in my pocket that I don’t know how I got. There are white plastic bags with black open circles and highway signs with three black closed circles (no idea of what either of them mean). “Fin de velocidad maxima”, “peligio” = “slow”. The colours have changed to red earth, cream stucco, some mustard yellow, mauve, still the greens and blues. We’re inching downhill in a line of trucks and buses, being overtaken by audacious motorcycles, all heading for the Pacific. Heliconias are sprouting from drains. The land breathes fertility; inhale hibiscus, exhale ginger; moist warm air that sticks to your lungs like it coats the forest.

10:12 am: The inside of the bus is silent, people stare out of the windows as the exhaust-tainted air washes in, or read, or nod off to sleep. Puntarenas has the smell of charcoal fire mixed with sea salt and trees with white-painted trunks in rings of white rocks. The branches are rattling with cicada song and holding dark nodes of termite nests. Red earth is giving way to rocky outcrops as the humidity increases.

10:41: We’ve hit roadwork; people have adopted the head-leaning-back-mouth-hanging-open posture. Gate with spiked metal wagon wheels, haven’t seen an oxcart yet. Fences made of wire wrapped around posts and living trees, some of which were pre-existing, some of which took root from a post, like propagation by cuttings. Mas ou menos uno hora to Liberia; coconut juice in plastic bags, potato chips, lottery tickets being sold to car windows as we stop for construction.

11:09 am: One way traffic due to roadwork, the last car in the moving lane of traffic gets a flag, marking the end of the line, which is then passed to the last car in the opposite direction.

11:34 am: Moving again, the sun’s coming out.

11:50 am: in Liberia, butterflies of all colours swarming.

12:21 pm: Passing open pastures, trees with lilac-coloured flowers, the road just got a lot bumpier.

1:05 pm: Saw my first oxcart, part of a statue of a boy leading a team of oxen with cargo. We’re learning the history and geography of the area (Guanacaste province), reforested cattle land due to the repression of fires since the ‘80s. “Bumpers Americanos Nuevos”, shiny chrome, but who drives American cars here? The statue of the white bull is coming up.

1:30 pm: Santa Rosa park; saw our first Morpho butterfly on the seriously potholed road in (iridescent peacock blue on the tops of the entire wings; and huge), Marvin hit the brakes hard to avoid driving into it with the bus, and clapped when it kept flying.

2:13 pm: Back after lunch at the station in Santa Rosa: an authentic Gallo Pinto with a salty and acidic bottled “salsa” sauce (think salad dressing) made by Lizano; Shredded cabbage, tomato, and onion salad with a light vinaigrette; fried fish; watermelon; and fruit juice. The mess was a humid one-room building with a high tin roof and one ceiling fan. The soundtrack was the Spanish dialogue of a soap opera on the TV. We found a stick bug outside the door. There was a police roadblock outside the turnoff to the park to catch illegal immigrants trying to get in from Nicaragua.

2:42 pm: We’ve hit the turnoff from the Inter-American and are now headed east along the road to the village of Santa Cecelia, the houses are unpainted, black vultures are flying, the sound is of stones bouncing of the undercarriage of the bus. We’re passing orange orchards and kids in school uniforms.

3:07 pm: In Santa Cecelia, there’s a bar/restaurant named the “Alaska”. Lots of people are wearing navy pants and light blue shirts with an arm patch on the left sleeve.

5:39 pm: Pitilla. Oh my; 1 hr, 59 mins of walking. I’m sitting on the porch. It all started well enough, one of the local jeeps we hired had enough room to take our larger packs, so we didn’t have to carry as much. Starting out we passed a few homesteads on either side of a red dirt road. I was one of the last ones to start as I paused to share my insect repellent with Nicole, Sarah, and Elaine. We formed a straggling group. Nicole and I forged ahead, met up with Kristin, and eventually joined Dick, Ross, Athena, Daryl, and Allison. We stopped occasionally to look at trees or birds. I now forget the names of all of them (the trees we were looking at were Cecropia). We reached a fork in the road (Diane told us about one fork in the otherwise straightforward road, she then went ahead of us on an ATV carrying the heavy equipment, leaving us to fend for ourselves). We were told to take the path to the right. The right side of the fork goes through a closed gate next to a person’s house featuring an open pipe gushing water. The others decided that this is not the fork she was talking about. Ross and I weren’t so sure based on the pattern of ATV tracks that go through the gate. There was some argument that if the fork were at the house, Diane would have said, go right at the house instead of the fork. We went with the majority and took the left fork, soon hitting a nondescript fork in the road. This was taken as vindication that this present fork was the one she meant. We took the right fork and ran into the Jeep coming back down from the station.
    We began to see parrots, leafcutter ants, sloth excrement. I mentioned that I could hear water, either rain or a stream; “If we get wet, it’s rain”. It begins to rain at about 4:50, gently at first. Nicole is the first to break out the rain poncho. Five minutes later there’s an audible increase in volume and it starts to pour. Daryl, Allison, Athena, Heater, and Sarah were somewhere ahead of me. I was walking with Nicole when the rain started and my glasses fogged up completely. Underneath my rain poncho, I was trying to get my camera into the plastic bag, but the wet fingers, blurred vision, and tiny plastic ridges of the seal conspired against me. I eventually gave up, folded it tight, and shoved it into my backpack. The ATV ruts we were walking in changed from the consistency of packed clay to soft plasticine, to slip (aptly named liquid mixture of water and clay used in pottery), to running sluiceways of caramel frappucino coloured water. We tried to walk on the grassy ridges between the tire grooves for traction. The ridges start out no wider than a balance beam, and often taper out to nothing. The rain cycled between heavier periods and times you think it’s almost going to stop before pouring again. After half an hour it stopped for good.
    The access road goes up and down as we climb the shoulder of an extinct volcano, ultimately gaining in net elevation. I was out of breath, Sarah graciously attributes it to the thin air, I tell her no; I’m just horribly out of shape. Diane made it to the station and dropped off the cargo. She then came back on the ATV and began ferrying soggy people marching slowly toward the station, two at a time, starting with those furthest away.
    Sarah and I were still walking, and we left the forest for open pastures, where another Jeep carrying probably-biologists passed us going the other way. Encouraged by the appearance of a gate, we went down a dip in the road, across a small bridge, up a slope and around a corner, and the station loomed out of the mist.
    The station is a one-storey wooden structure elevated about two feet off the ground on posts. The front has two large dorm rooms, the back is a park staff area. In an open breezeway in the middle, we have our classroom, and some tables making up our dining area. The kitchen is concrete and detached from the main structure. A wide patio runs all the way around, and the whole thing is topped of with a corrugated tin roof, with the occasional plastic panel as a skylight. There’s no electricity to speak of, and the water comes directly from a pipe in a stream adjacent to the station.
    I sit on the stairs to the patio and notice a cobweb above me, which leads to a full web a metre in diameter with a golden orb weaver sitting in the middle. I took a photo of it, and other people suggested I poke it. I declined.
    I guzzled half a litre of my lukewarm swimming pool tap water, which tasted fantastic at the time. I took another photo of my once-grey, now-brown hiking boots, claimed the top of a bunk bed, and sat down outside to write this. It’s now 6:07 and rapidly getting dark.

6:56 pm: Found a tree frog in the bathroom (on the shower curtain, it was captured, identified as a female Drab Tree Frog, and released). Really cold water in the shower, washed one part at a time. Dinner of Gallo Pinto and good spaghetti, white pineapple, watermelon, papaya, and tamarind juice; I sat at the end of a bench to discover I was directly under another Golden Orb Weaver.

8:26 pm: Had orientation talk, which exacerbated my paranoia about snakes. Actually no, it was never my paranoia. (We learned to use snakebite kits, which must be carried by at least one member of any group leaving the station. They consistent of a yellow plastic box containing one syringe-like apparatus with a suction cup on the end; pressing the cup against your skin and depressing the plunger-thing caused a strong vacuum in the cup. A few different sizes of cups were available as well as a razor, for shaving off hair preventing an airtight seal against the skin. In theory some snake venom would be sucked out if applied within the first couple minutes. We have five hours before tissue death occurs. It takes 25 minutes to reach the village on the ATV, then two to three hours to get to the nearest hospital, which means we’d better be within an hour’s limp to the station. We’re not to run or do anything which would speed the venom reaching the heart. If we’re bit on a limb, we’re to keep it below the heart. I forget at what point our eyes start bleeding.) We were also told to check under our mattresses for scorpions. Cicadas are in the trees all around us, and bugs are swarming anything that emits or reflects light, including us; bugs keep hitting me and crawling over me. Moths are circling the battery-powered compact fluorescent, who knows how many.