I had the amazing opportunity to go to Costa Rica during J-Term this year and it was the absolute best trip I have ever been on in my life. I have heard from many people that once you go to Costa Rica, especially when you go with the tour guide that we went with, you'll never want to leave. From what I experienced, that is absolutely true. When we got to the airport on our last day, I was not ready to leave this amazing place.
However, we traveled for 13 of the best days of my life. The trip was oriented to be a mixture of outdoor recreation and biology. This trip mixed these two topics so well that I now understand how they blend together. This understanding couldn't have been achieved without the help of Dr. Swann and Bruce Guillaume while on this trip. Our tour guide, Madri did an excellent job at achieving the goals of our trip by giving us the best experiences possible, the best guides possible, the best food possible, and many other things that made this trip exceptional.
Since we didn’t have Wi-Fi well enough to blog while in Costa Rica, I will give two different experiences that really stuck out to me and made this trip a life-changing experience.
Experience 1, Day 3:
This morning we woke up early to leave the hotel by 745 to start our day. I was up by 530 and out the door by 6. I sat in the lobby and had coffee and saw a monkey and a black squirrel. The breakfast was very good, it consisted of pineapple, watermelon, guava, cantaloupe, rice and beans, star fruit, papaya, sausage, eggs, and bread. After breakfast, we met with Madri’s friends whose names I couldn’t understand. They showed us around all the property that was owned by their family since the 1900’s. The first two hours we spent under a hut down by the river learning the history of how they adopted that land and how his grandmother divided it up to give to the 11 grandkids. After we got the history, he had many exotic plants, fruits, and vegetables and learned all about their medicinal uses. There were some leaves that we tried that were so strong, that they numbed your tongue, mouth, and lips. Eventually, after drinking water, it went away.
After the nasty leaf, they picked us all a coconut fresh off a tree, cut the top off of it and we got to drink fresh coconut water, it was delicious. After trying all the indigenous species of plants and fruits, a brother to the first guy we talked with took us on a hike through the trails throughout their woods. They explained to us the different types of plants and showed us some birds and poison dart frogs, which are never the same pattern in their color schemes. After coming out the woods around 12:30, his family had lunch waiting for us. Lunch consisted of chicken, rice, beans, salad, a sauce for the chicken, and pineapple jello. That was probably one of the best meals we have had because it was home cooked food. After lunch, they explained to us what we could be doing for the afternoon, and it sounded fun. We were going to be going out into the woods and making transects for that were 50m apart, 30m long, and 2m wide. We did four of these throughout the woods and during this process, we had to identify the trees that were within our 2m width from the center of our transect but they had to be greater than 10cm in diameter at breast height. After doing these transects, we went back to the hut on the river, wrapped up our discussion and left. This day wasn’t really a life changing experience as much as it reassured that I want to pursue a career in outdoor biology or ecology. The people we met with were so nice and caring. They truly cared about land conservation and to see something like that was incredible, because it’s not that often that you see it here in the states.
This trip allowed me to see things that I could never imagine. I am forever grateful that I got to share these experiences with the ones I got to share it with. I am also grateful for the opportunity given to me by Maryville College with the scholarships I received that allowed me to go. This school is truly the best school anyone could ever go to.
However, we traveled for 13 of the best days of my life. The trip was oriented to be a mixture of outdoor recreation and biology. This trip mixed these two topics so well that I now understand how they blend together. This understanding couldn't have been achieved without the help of Dr. Swann and Bruce Guillaume while on this trip. Our tour guide, Madri did an excellent job at achieving the goals of our trip by giving us the best experiences possible, the best guides possible, the best food possible, and many other things that made this trip exceptional.
Since we didn’t have Wi-Fi well enough to blog while in Costa Rica, I will give two different experiences that really stuck out to me and made this trip a life-changing experience.
Experience 1, Day 3:
This morning we woke up early to leave the hotel by 745 to start our day. I was up by 530 and out the door by 6. I sat in the lobby and had coffee and saw a monkey and a black squirrel. The breakfast was very good, it consisted of pineapple, watermelon, guava, cantaloupe, rice and beans, star fruit, papaya, sausage, eggs, and bread. After breakfast, we met with Madri’s friends whose names I couldn’t understand. They showed us around all the property that was owned by their family since the 1900’s. The first two hours we spent under a hut down by the river learning the history of how they adopted that land and how his grandmother divided it up to give to the 11 grandkids. After we got the history, he had many exotic plants, fruits, and vegetables and learned all about their medicinal uses. There were some leaves that we tried that were so strong, that they numbed your tongue, mouth, and lips. Eventually, after drinking water, it went away.
After the nasty leaf, they picked us all a coconut fresh off a tree, cut the top off of it and we got to drink fresh coconut water, it was delicious. After trying all the indigenous species of plants and fruits, a brother to the first guy we talked with took us on a hike through the trails throughout their woods. They explained to us the different types of plants and showed us some birds and poison dart frogs, which are never the same pattern in their color schemes. After coming out the woods around 12:30, his family had lunch waiting for us. Lunch consisted of chicken, rice, beans, salad, a sauce for the chicken, and pineapple jello. That was probably one of the best meals we have had because it was home cooked food. After lunch, they explained to us what we could be doing for the afternoon, and it sounded fun. We were going to be going out into the woods and making transects for that were 50m apart, 30m long, and 2m wide. We did four of these throughout the woods and during this process, we had to identify the trees that were within our 2m width from the center of our transect but they had to be greater than 10cm in diameter at breast height. After doing these transects, we went back to the hut on the river, wrapped up our discussion and left. This day wasn’t really a life changing experience as much as it reassured that I want to pursue a career in outdoor biology or ecology. The people we met with were so nice and caring. They truly cared about land conservation and to see something like that was incredible, because it’s not that often that you see it here in the states.
Experience 2, Day 10
We had been at the beach for three days now doing various activities and learning about certain groups. We had been volunteering at a WWF sea turtle hatchery for about 2 days, releasing baby sea turtles back to the ocean, building nests, and learning about how sea turtles hatch and develop. On the last night we were working with this group, they invited us for dinner and we had an optional choice to go on a night patrol along the beach to look for nesting sea turtles after dark. Three of us including myself decided to go on this patrol down the beach looking for sea turtles. Somehow, and I am still in shock by this, but we found a nesting black sea turtle. During this moment, I didn’t think it was real, I thought it was all make believe. The three of us, Lauren, Casey, and myself were in shock. Once Sergio, the WWF worker we were with made sure she was ready to lay eggs, we held red lights on her and watched as Sergio caught her eggs and put them in a bag to take back to the hatchery so they could be born. Words don’t begin to describe how it felt to watch this magnificent creature in the sand laying her eggs. This was the best experience I have ever had in my life.
This trip allowed me to see things that I could never imagine. I am forever grateful that I got to share these experiences with the ones I got to share it with. I am also grateful for the opportunity given to me by Maryville College with the scholarships I received that allowed me to go. This school is truly the best school anyone could ever go to.