It keeps getting better

Let me try to describe a hike in Cahuita National Park, a lovely Costa Rican park on the Carribean´s shores. You walk through costal tropical forest, a more accurate term than jungle. Imagine plants and tree trunks so thick and tangled they resemble a Gordonian knot. There are infinite variations on the color green, and the leaves come in countless variations on shapes like ovals, hearts, five pointed stars, semicircles, and more. This world seems to be built from birdsongs.. whistles, squawks,trills,rythmic chirps, gurgles that crowd the forest so `powerfully you need to wade through them. Fungi hide on the sides of trees, along with brown and green lizards and huge spiders. Everything has the smell and feel of mud after rain. Postman butterflies, small black, white and red ones dart about, along with many, many others. Blue morphs are the most dramatic. They are as big as your hand, and when the sun shines on them, they are iridescent blue. They eat decaying, fermenting fruit, and some say it makes their flight erratic because they are drunk. The ocean grumbles and crashes, keeping everything cool.Cicadas squeaks are constant. Soft rain falls like a massage. The loudest noise is the roaring ÄAARRRGGGHHHMMMMAAA¨from howler monkeys, which are considered the world´s loudest animal. They are really inoffensive little critters, just making a lot of noise to define their territory and avoid disputes. This hopefully gives you some idea of this experience. We also visited a wildlife rehabilitation center that cares for injured monkeys, birds, jaguarmundis, etc. and tries to release them to the wild. Some have been kept as pets and must adjust to being wild animals if possible. The approach is very sililar to the Museum where I often work... with different animals. This is an astonishing area. Tomorrow we head for the Volcan Arenal area, arriving around dinner... we will be there 3 days, I will check in sometime during that time. Howler monkeys just started yelling near our hotel, they say, HI!

indescribable!!!

But I will try to describe it. Again, we are having some trouble finding computers that will upload from our memory cards, but will keep trying. We just came from three days on Bastimentos Island, off the Panama coast in the Carribean. This is a town of brightly painted wooden houses standing on stilts to avoid flooding.There are no cars on the island. A sidewalk leads through small but beautiful Old Town, past homes, restaurants, groceries, hostels, etc. The culture and feeling are really more Rasta than Central American. Most of the people are black,they speak a combination of Spanish and Creole/Rasta English. There are some folks from mainland Panama, Germany, and the shopkeepers tend to be Asian. Kids wander on the sidewalk freely and safe. They play marbles, and push brightly colored plastic boxes around in races. (My personal editorial note:KIDS DO NOT NEED COMPUTER GAMES!In fact, they are more creative, free thinking, connected with nature and their community, and adventurous without them. Enough of that.) People stroll and chat all the time; we befriended some of the local characters - actually everybody is a character! There is always reggae, salsa, or soul music being broadcast from the bars and cafes. One of the most relaxed places we have seen. One day we hiked to an organic cafe high on a hilltop over the jungle. The next we kayaked through an estuary, past short mangroves that border the water from the tropical forest. Yesterday we took a boat deep into the jungle, where we hiked with a guide. He took us to a cave where we waded knee deepp in water, and saw thousands of fruit bats. We may be nuts, but it was fantastic!! We hope to return some day. We are now in Bocas Town, on the main island in this chain, It demands exploration if it doesnot rain. Tomorrow we swing north into Costa Rica, fly back to the US in about 9 days. Believe it or not, the adventure will continue for a while. This is an experiment to see how we handle extended trips at this point in our lives... we will evaluate when we get home. We will first visit friends in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and familt in Pittsburgh - it sounds much hotter in those places than Central America has been! Stay tuned. Photos will come.

Another place we love

Boquete is wonderful. Yesterday we hiked in a tropical forest in the highlands above here. Huge ferns, trees with flowers and other plants growing from their trunks, everything one of a hundred variations of the color green. We were looking for resplendant quetzals, a beautiful and elusive bird species Today we walked, accompanied by a dog part of the way, to a creative park. There is an eco garden where they use things like old blenders for planters. have funny sculptures everywhere, and wonderful views of the local volcano. We are hurrying, have to pack for our next destination. Boquete is a magical town by a river with a volcano towering overhead. Tomorrow we will be on Bastiemento Island in the Bocas del Toro archipelago in the Carribean. I do not know if there is an internet cafe on Bastiementos, but we will be on the main island by Sunday, and there is one there. So worry not... we will be having adventures and check in early next week. And yes, more photos will come!!

Boquete is complex and great.

Conversation overheard at the Boquete Tuesday market yesterday: "Now we should do yoga. We are old enough that it doesn{t matter if we make fools of ourselves." "Yes, and even Fidel Castro says yoga is healthy!" These were Norte Americano retirees, the region abounds in them. The market had some indigenous folks selling beautiful crafts, but mostly Norte Americanos offering wine tasting and selling pies, vegetarian chile, crafts, and more. The conversation and atmosphere felt like Marin County, which we can visit with a half hour drive from home, it was rather surreal. The serious problem is that people pay large amounts for houses, rising property values so locals are priced out and sometimes lose land. This happens in Costa Rica and Nicaragua too. But we explored, and this area has grown on us a lot. The garden Kate photographed is beautiful and bizarre, with sculptures of painted cows, a dodo bird, a golfer, a woman in a bikini and much more. The views of the mountains are wonderful. We walked through an agricultural community where people grow tomatoes, strawberries and more. Kate included a shot of that. We stopped in the cafe she photographed for a strawberry smoothy. The people promote the health benefits of strawberries, and you can get them in smoothies, milkshakes, sundays, with amaretto or kahlua. Fascinating walk. We will stay here and hike until Friday, more to come.

These are photos from our day in Boquete, Panama. A scene from the road we walked along on our hike today.

Paul stands in Mi Jardin es su Jardin, a garden full of beautiful plants and strange sculptures.

The menu from the strawberry restaurant where we stopped for strawberry shakes.

Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama

We are in Boquete, a pretty town in the mountains of northern Panama. We will stay here 2 or 3 days and explore. It is interesting, at first glance, Panama seems more integrated with the US than Costa Rica or (definetly) Nicaragua. They use the dollar, and there are lots of McDonalds, TGIFridays, etc. Part of it is possibly their connction with the US through the Canal, there are also lots of US Retirees around. But this is Central America.There is certainly poverty. There are lots of indigenous people in traditional dress in Boquete, and parts of the town have the same kinds of houses and flavor as anywhere down here. Other sections feel like a coolsville town near Yosemite. More thoughts to come. Costa Rica and Nicaragua are not friendly to each other. Nicaragua is poorer, and traditionally Central American. Granada is a mixture of Nicaraguans with cell phones in cafes and people carrying bundles on their heads, driving cattle through town (small herds), and sometimes sleeping on the streets. Politics are everywhere, any given neighborhood will have pro or anti Sandanista graffiti. Nicaraguans resent Costa Ricans, several Nicaraguans told us Costa Ricans are snobby, and said the country is full of violence. We have never felt danger in Costa Rica, and find the people to be as generous and friendly as Nicaraguans, just more reserved.Politics are less visible in Costa Rica. There was a dockworkers strike and riot in the Carribean city of Limon aten days or so ago (we are not going there). There was also a march of several thousand of the Invisible in the capital... Nicaraguan migrants, displaced rural folk, gay people, etc. That would have been interesting. One issue is that many Nicaraguans come here as seasonal farm workers, and are not well treated. Their experience is obvioulsy different from ours.Another is that there is a long lasting dispute about which country controls navigation on a river along their border. No one has said this, but I wonder if both countries feel mutual resentment that the Nicaraguan Contras (right wing anti Sandanista guerillas in the 1980s) illegally set up camps in Costa Rica. Very sad and complex. Both countries are great, can they get along? More to come, stay cool (especially folks in the East.)

Sad to leave...

This area is gorgeous, and we made some good contacts. We hope to come back one day. Tomorrow we will take a ferry across Golfo Dulce to the town of Golfito, where we will get a bus to Boquette, in the mountains of northern Panama for a few days. Will check in from there in a coupld days or so. Kendra, if you are reading this, getting to Corcovado National Park turned out to be more complex and expensive than we expected. We plan to try another time, knowing what it entails. Sounds like some things have changed since you were there. Still... we had a very nice hike today in the Montapalo Area, down the Peninsula from Puerto Jimenez. We saw many, many monkeys, gorgeous beaches covered with pelicans, more scarlet macaws. At one point, we heard something screaming... my guess is a puma (mountain lion) close to us. They really have no interest in people... kind of exciting once you know that - so we didn´t see it. Anyhow, we are back in Puerto Jimenez safe and sound. And oh yes, we are hoping our hotel in Boquete will have a computer where we can upload pictures. Onward! More in a couple days or so.