CTSTCostaRica2022

 

  Today, we awoke bedraggledly from 5 hours of shivering sleep, and crawled to breakfast. After breakfast, we went to the Verdiazul hatchery and learned how to dig for turtle eggs. Neat! Niamh and Silas found actual turtle eggs, in addition to the fake ones! And all in the time it took some of us to find... 0 turtle eggs. Then at 2:00, we left to pick up tiny pieces of plastic off of the beach. Some of us thought that we were going to the beach for fun so we wore bathing suits. Ryan found eight beer bottles. Carl filled a coconut with 150 hermit crabs (The Crabconut). Doing our part to protect the animals? Luckily, we collected a lot of plastic (mostly chupa sticks) and gave it to the nice buckets. Then Verdiazul kidnapped the buckets and locked them away forever. We finished the day of hard work (only because we stayed up until 2:00 am the previous night) by going to the beach and looking at things. Rock things, fish things, star things. Tree things, trash things, a horde of child...

  We started off our last morning at Finca La Anita with a simple, delicious breakfast before heading off on the bus towards the beach! After an unfortunate accident up the road caused us to take an extra detour, we finally arrived at our Hotel Tatanka by Playa Junquillal and had a nice pizza lunch. After that, we took some time to get settled in before heading off to the beach. Heavy rain and wind cut our trip short and threatened our chances at going on our nighttime turtle search. Fortunately, the weather was on our side, and after listening to a presentation on the Second year bio-informatics trip, we watched quite possibly the worst movie ever made "In Time", starring Justin Timberlake and that girl Karen from Mean Girls.  After that, we headed off into the night at around 10pm to go hunt for a nesting turtle, and after having to turn around and make a two-kilometer detour, we finally got to watch an olive ridley turtle lay her eggs and make its way back to the water....

     Today was our last day at Finca La Anita and on studying the ants. We prepared ourselves for presenting the discoveries we have uprooted and finalized our work. Presenting was one of the hard parts of the project that we had to endure. Though once each one of the groups finished presenting we could see there stress and worry wash away just like what's about to happen. Halfway through all the presenting the rain rushed down to us rapidly bringing with it the intense sound of thousands upon thousands of droplets hitting the metal roof which muffled the presenters midway through explaining their discoveries.      After finishing the presentations we all congratulated each other and then proceeded to have lunch. After a long break we took a tractor ride to the new lab that's being built. There we sacrificed Sage to the volcano and took the tractor into town for a great experience in making Costa Rica's food.     We made tortillas, rice and beans,...

Today started early as usual with a 7:30 breakfast of beans and rice along with eggs and fruits, but today unlike other days consisted completely of science! We started with Dr. Pinto at 8:30am and went till 9pm with the occasional break here and there, including an amazing break of coffee/hot chocolate with a side of savory empanadas. Sadly today we lost two very wonderful scientists, Sage and Kim to spontaneous combustion likely due to stress. We finished our experiments and lab notebooks and will present them tomorrow!  We had a lovely lunch and a wonderful dinner of gallitos which are Costa Rican tacos, and proposed a toast to the wonderful owners of Finca la Anita and to new friendships!

Today started off with a bang as all the other days have. The food was superb and the juices that have been different every meal always find a way to surprise me. the flavors were sweet and savory almost melting in your mouth every time you took a bite. The smell of the food wafting from the kitchen almost made your heart skip a beat. We had to wake up earlier than usual to go on a spectacular adventure through an area of the jungle on horseback! The views were beautiful and the ride felt smooth with only the once in awhile bumps on the trail. The lands grew darker the further we went in, the trees covering us from the rain coming down helping us continue with no worries. Left and right the teens were falling off and soon it was only a few left, but we had to continue. We rallied the troops saying "oy lads together we journey beyond!"  Finally we made it all out in one piece except for Sage who had earlier been eaten by a horse which thought his hair was hay. After everyone w...

 At 7:00 this morning, we all awoke and met for breakfast, a delicious combination of rice and beans, juice, and an omelet with bell peppers. The juice for each meal continues to surprise us, and is ever changing.  After breakfast, we all met on the deck and listened to Pablo explain today's schedule. Instead of morning science we would be traveling to the base of a mountain via tractor and hike up it to a natural waterfall where we could swim. Soon, we were all dressed in appropriate gear and loaded into the tractor wagon, packed like sardines but excited.  Once we reached the mountain, we unloaded and met Carlos, who would be guiding us on our hike. Then we were off!! The trek was slippery due to recent rain, and harrowing at times, forcing our group to split between the speedy zebras and the slower zebras. The hike resulted in several casualties; in fact, Sage tragically lost his footing in a particularly muddy slope and fell to his untimely death thousands of fee...

 Day 4, We woke up and ate marvelously tasting breakfast. Made so well that the pancakes made us flip just like the pancakes in the fryer. The eggs scrambled our brains, they were so well made, we got them gains. Of course, this was all at 7:30.  At 8:30 we went to the classroom to do fungus research with a fun guy (Dr. Pinto, a biologist from the university of Costa Rica) with fungus until 11:30. During this time, we also looked at an Acromyrmex echinatior. We ate lunch at 12:00, burger, cooked just like a crabby patty. YaaaaAAAAaaAaAAAAAaaAaaaAAAr, me boy!  Sage  was eaten like a google Slider by the angry angus beef patties. The delightful experience was paired with the refreshing feeling of mango juice. It was so refreshing, we froze like ice until 2:00.  Then we went back to class and discussed experiment questions. We thought about experimenting on the the animals of Costa Rica in various ways, like Doofenshmirtz when he looks at Perry the Platypus. Then...

At 7:30, the group ate breakfast and then went to the classroom to prepare for fungus excavation. We then went on a walk down Finca la Anita's main road, keeping an eye out for any mounds that would indicate a young colony. Each group extracted one, and then we took a break (Sage got pulled into the leafcutter (Atta cephalotes) mound, and was, sadly, consumed). We then ate lunch and toured the mariposa building, and after another break, went back to the classroom to look at the bacteria experiment from yesterday. Dinner was consumed, and then the group built houses for the extracted colonies. We created economy today, for the very first time. Loans were made, insurance went poorly, and credit scores were analyzed. Perhaps tomorrow we'll bundle them into mortgage securities. Will has taken a loan at 2% interest, except it's applied hourly and compound. The interest rate also doubles every hour. Sage got eaten by a loan shark, and we turned one coin into six coins with a care...

 At 7:00AM, we went to the deck for covid tests. All negative, luckily! Next we had a nice breakfast, then took the cacao tour.  On the tour, we saw the cacao boiler and learned how the beans are crushed to get their nibs. We were lucky enough to taste some homemade chocolate, and we saw the cacao orchards, and our guide (and owner of the farm on which we are staying) Pablo cut open a cacao pod for us so that we could sample the delicious fruit inside which surrounds the beans. We then followed him back to the dining area where he cut open a palm to reveal the delicious "heart of palm" for us, which we sampled before watching him make a wonderfully aromatic and fresh ceviche. We shared this ceviche for lunch and supplemented it with the staple rice and beans as well as a potent ginger lemonade (a new fruit drink is provided at each meal!) Then we had some downtime, and some of us walked down the road to the convenience store in the village. In the village, we met a friendly s...

Day 1: After a long flight with a fantastic view from the plane window, we had a long van ride to the ranch. Multiple hours of driving later, we got to the ranch and settled into our cabins. Our host Pablo told us about the ranch and its rules. Not long after, we were issued our rubber boots, to protect from the snakes and occasional ticks. Good fish was prepared for our dinner, with a side of salad and tropical juice. Unfortunately, Sage was eaten by a shark. So we all slept soundly. Written by Axel and Sage.