6:30 am: Up, and almost everyone else is too. They’ve all assumed their usual positions around the classroom where they were sitting yesterday. It’s like none of them left. I went to bed a lot earlier than some, I don’t know if anyone pulled an all-nighter. I have one more results and discussion to go. I could also flesh out some of the skimpier labs and add in some footnotes. Sarah is already done, earning her much resentment. She’s planning to hike up the small mountain, Orosilito, at 11:30 with anyone else who’s done. I plan on going. It’s raining though, and misty.

7:17 am: Breakfast consisted of Gallo Pinto, corn tortillas, that tofu-looking cheese, hot chocolate, and coffee, coffee, coffee. We figure 4am was about when the last person went to bed last night.

9:51 am: Finished, two hours to spare. I’ve consumed my second cup of coffee and I don’t want to go through the labs another time. It stopped raining but it’s still misty. All the paper here is damp, my labs are written in medium-point smudgy black ballpoint on disintegrating yellow newsprint. I just found a large insect squashed on one of the pages.
    The park ranger in charge of the station is leaving. We’re getting a new one in soon. We all said goodbye, or more specifically “Hasta luego”.
    We were discussing the blankets on the bunks. We were issued pillows, bare mattresses and a single blanket. The other dorm room has bubblegum pink blankets. We got a colour that other people identified as blue, or green, or teal, or turquoise, or jade. I would call it “malachite”. This led us to wonder if the dorms were meant to be split by gender. (We have three males and eleven females among the students. Ross is on his own in the other dorm, but that may be due to the fact that Daryl and I found out early that he snores and subsequently abandoned him. Later, Elaine would kid that Ross would start bragging to his friends that he was in a dorm room full of girls who would call his name all night... and then yell at him to stop snoring.)

1:15 pm: Standing on the top of Orosilito with Sarah. We left at 11:35 and got here at 1:00. It’s cloudy, though the rain that caught us on the way up has stopped. Amazing plants but no view whatsoever as we’re right in the clouds. We’re bouncy, through some combination of being soaking wet and past caring, relief after the rain stopped, euphoria of being done with the labs, or the thinness of the atmosphere at this altitude.
    It wasn’t raining when we left the station, the trail started climbing right away and it just kept going. We passed all the areas where we did our labs and headed into uncharted territory. A drizzle began shortly and we weren’t carrying our rain ponchos for some reason, weight or optimism. As it developed into a hard rain we decided to keep going as this would be our only sure chance to ascend the mountain.
    We were headed for a cloud forest, where the moist air from the Pacific is forced up by the mountain until the water condenses and bathes the forest in a near-constant mist. This situation produces a microcosm of unique organisms. Seeing this was one of the reasons that both Sarah and I came to Costa Rica.
    So we kept going, up the slippery mud trail, scrambling up a near-vertical ladder of interlaced tree roots, guided only by Diane’s vague directions before we left the station. Eventually the rain petered out, leaving streams of water running down the trail. We were thoroughly saturated with water and breathing hard with fatigue. We had a bit of a scare as we hiked up a series of steep ascents and were abruptly confronted with what appeared to be a snake hanging in our faces. It turned out to be a stick with a head.
    We ducked under a log, climbed up a narrow channel, and the world changed. The cloud forest that greeted us is amazing, all the trees are dwarfed and gnarled like bonsai, and everything is carpeted in mosses and liverworts. Orchids like miniature white handkerchiefs on wiry stems emerge from the layer of moss wrapping every tree trunk and twisted branch. The orchids, suspended in mid-air, have a yellow throat and smell faintly of lemons, giving the forest an air of magic. Epiphytes thrive, creating a hanging garden of layers upon layers of plants.
    On a clear day, we would have had a view out over the top of the forest, a valley of green. Today, we were met with the utter blankness of the inside of the clouds, but we could feel the wind and the cold and the unechoing void of a great unseen space, knowing that we were an island of life inside a vapour sea.

2:30pm: We’re back at the station; I’m up to four “mudslides”, Sarah’s up to 10. She was walking ahead of me and I had better luck by deliberately not stepping where she stepped. Other than that, the walk down was uneventful, no more rain, no more snake-headed sticks.
    We’ve got a new ranger at the station; he speaks some English, and is now repairing the broken floorboards in the station. He has a toolbox made out of an empty bleach bottle and, with the help of a hammer, is using a machete like a chisel. He’s a tall man with a short beard and moustache, and very shiny shoes. He also has a child, a little boy who is now running around.
    I smell pretty bad. Since it stopped raining a few hours ago, we’ve been soaked and just steeping in it.