Monteverde

The story begins in the mid-20th century when some Quakers refused to join the army during Vietnam. In protest, they moved en mass to Monteverde. In order to preserve the watershed that was so essential to their livelihoods, they chose to protect large portions of the cloud forest. Monteverde has since become famous for its ecotourism industry, with three cloudforest reserves, some of which contain rare premontane forest: regenerated growth in land that was once stripped for agriculture. You can zipline through the canopy (one could; I would not), ride to waterfalls on horseback, sample lots of local coffee, and go shopping for lots of local arts and crafts.

There are a TON of hotels in the area, all of which fill up in the high season, our winter. Our summer is the rainy season in the area. The dry season is by no means dry, but the rain becomes unconventional, by which I mean, it's more like the clouds come and get you; the drops are very fine. Everything here is always a little damp.

The Quaker community is still alive and well here, and many other gringos have come to join them. There are two private schools K-11 that are English immersion, so lots of people, my aunt and uncle included, come here for a year or a semester for a change of pace, and send their kids to school. There's a yoga studio down the street where I went for an Ashtanga class and some insight meditation, and there's a cheese factory that makes its own cheese (very expensive). Bob and Susan own a chocolate shop above the bat museum; they are learning to make their own chocolate. Tomorrow night is a Spanish club potluck, where all the gringos will only speak in their broken Spanish, because the first rule of Spanish club is that you do not speak English in Spanish club. One huge frustration of mine is that I have discovered that my Spanish is not nearly as good as I remember it being. I trip over my words, I stall out, I miss-conjugate or opt for more simple sentences. I always "used to know the word for that" but forget. Hopefully next week, when I move in with some ticos, the problem will quickly remedy itself. I've been flipping through the flashcards I made in Ecuador, and I'm picking up some of the words. Evan and Debbie study Spanish with a tenacity and dedication that is truly admirable. They've only been at it for two months, but it puts my comparative ten years to shame.

Evan and Debbie live in a delightful little house with wooden walls and floors and enourmous windows everywhere. From the porch we get visits from agutis, mot-mots, iguanas, hummingbirds, and tucanets, not to mention everyone's hundreds of pet dogs. There are butterflies galore, among which stand out the Blue Morphos. I have seen more wildlife from the house than I saw in my walk through the Monteverde Cloudforest Reserve. Foods that are fun to eat here are avocados, papayas (which taste like a hundred flowers), fried plantain, mangos and mini-mangos, guayaba (a spicy and pretty yucky little fruit with a hard chewy outside and a pink seedy inside)(the plus side, we can pick them ourselves in the horse pasture), pineapple, local dairy, and coffee. Right now we are in the windy season, so it's much less rainy and at night, the wind gusts sound like waves, and I think I am near the ocean.

Today was the first day here that I really did anything besides tut around, read, eat as much food as a hungry bear, and flip through my flashcards. I went to the Cloudforest reserve and walked the trails for some four hours. They were really well labeled and well-maintained, with cement grids for footing ("galletas de cemento", "cement cookies"). What is the cloud forest like? It's like Fern Gully. It's like nothing ever dies, it just keeps proliferating. The foliage is exuberant; the trees are encase in strangler figs and Tarzan vines, which in turn are encased in moss, lichen, epiphyitic plants, orchids, and ferns. There were waterfalls, white faced coatis with their young, hummingbirds, sparrow-like birds, and... no other wildlife to speak of. The guidebook will warn you about that. Even so, the forest was ecstatically alive in every way. Throughout my walk everything was wet with the rain-spray of the clouds. I walked up to the lookout at the continental divide, and the visibility was low low low. On a day that is like the opposite of today, you can see all the way over the Nicoya Peninsula to the Pacific Ocean. But days like today are special, too, because you can look out over the slopes of the cloud forest believing that nothing else exists. The white-grey mist obliterates everything about 10 meters out, muffles sound and light, and the wind blows the mist into your face like you've reached the end of the world and it's just you and whiteness and the tops of trees blotting the sliver of mountainside you can see. I also crossed a hanging bridge, which some of you may know is a huge accomplishment for me. It was very beautiful, and I could see the orchids growing in the tops of the trees, but it was also terrifying. I did not die.

Because the hanging bridge was not enough of an adrenaline rush, I then went back into town and had a cup of coffee at the bookstore. Then I went to Cafe Monteverde and tried three cups of coffee of different roasts and learned some more about the different processes. I'm still shaking.

Tomorrow I have plans to go to the bat museum (!!!) and to hike to the waterfall in San Luis. Friday morning I leave for Turrubarres to begin my yoga job.