Week 6: Testing Fate

My host brothers and I under part of the waterfall

Ok so week 6 started out very productively with meetings and approvals and long days actually working on my project so Monday through Thursday afternoon are not super interesting so I shall skip them. On Thursday night I was sitting on my log watching the sunset with the 2 dogs who do not get tied up when the little Chihuahua runs up and jumps on my lap and I am happy because he is the softest and that was fun. Suddenly my whole family joins me and is like were giving the dogs baths you should come. Giving the dogs baths means walking them into the ocean and letting them swim about then declaring them clean... they are not but thats ok. So after we put the dogs back in their spots to guard the house my host brothers and dad were all Emma or Eva which is how they say my name, you should take a bath too. I tried to be all I literally saw a crocodile 20 ft from here yesterday but they would have none of it and insisted that if there was a crocodile in the ocean with us it would eat one of them first because they are smaller. This didn't make me feel better but I decided that swimming in the ocean at sunset with my host family should happen so swimming I went. It was wonderful and not as scary because since it was high tide we never were in more than 2 feet of water so it was more like wading but I suspect that big fish that attract crocodiles don't go that shallow so sorta safe I think.
             Friday was a big day for the cooperative I work with, a large group of fishermen and women came from the Nicoya Peninsula (look at map of Costa Rica) to observe the coop with the hopes of starting their own. In this event I got to sit and be awkwardly not Costa Rican all day but it ended with a fishing tour! My host dad was the captian of the boat I was on so I got a special seat and the best of the bait which was marvelous. Because all the other people on the boat were professional artisan  fishermen we caught quite a few fish, I did not catch anything but thats ok. We stayed on the boat until it was quite dark outside which was cool because the ocean completely changes in the dark. From the light of my cell phone flashlight I could watch squid and shrimp glide along the top of the water and most amazingly and I am not going to get the chemistry right here but something about the salt composition in this part of the ocean makes it glow bright green when you are moving fast enough, so when the boat was moving I could stick my hand in the ocean and make streams of neon green light in the water. It was awesome and I was throughly amused until someone on the boat was like you need to be careful how much you do that or you will draw the sharks closer. After that comment I did not decide to dunk my hand back in but still it was quite worth the unknown risk.
             Saturday was a little riskier still because I decided to walk down to Playa Azul by myself because I wanted some blue sand and I got pretty far until I saw a strange looking log in the distance. I was convincing myself that I was just being paranoid because I was by myself but as I was about to continue said strange looking log got up and walked into the ocean, it was a crocodile, I about faced and walked as calmly as I could back to the safety of the fishing boats. This encounter did not stop me from swimming in the ocean that evening.

this is 1/4 of the entire waterfall

            Sunday was the riskiest day I've had here but it was the most worth it. The best way to describe it is that had I known how dangerous it was going to be I might have freaked out a bit more but ignorance really really is bliss in this case. My host family decided to take me and Lauren to the waterfall. It is the tallest in Costa Rica and I have been looking forward to seeing it since I got here so I was very excited that my family had agreed to take me. The waterfall is actually connected to a garden and costs 20 US dollars to get in. My host family did not want to pay that so we went our own special way. If you are ever going to this waterfall pay the $20 and you will be putting yourself at much less risk but you won't see the same amount of nature as we saw. Our way was walking on pig trails (trails cut by these smallish warthog things) unstream of the river Tarcolitos which is fed by the giant waterfall . It was actually a really pretty walk but it involved a lot of wading through the river rapids in which my feet got caught between rocks many many times and then walking through the jungle up very steep inclines on a path that was not quite the width of one of my feet. This was very dangerous as I found out as I slipped and fell down about 15ft till a tree caught me but it was still more or less an adventure so we went along with it. We came across some really cool wildlife as we were walking along there were a ton of very cool colorful birds, we caught a glimpse of a warthog, saw a very large black snake, and caught some bright green and black frogs. It took about 2 1/2 hours to reach the top but we finally found the waterfall, or at least a portion of it, the entire waterfall is over 200ft so we really only saw a quarter of it but the quarter was well worth the journey. We played in the waterfall for quite sometime and then headed back the way we came. Luckily we did not meet up with any more snakes. When we arrived home I was super exhausted and went to bed a happy camper.

Clever and his poison dart frog

This is a baby version of what we saw

             I did not fully understand how dangerous our journey had been until this morning when my host mom woke me up to watch a show on animal planet about deadly animals. She woke me up because last week we watched the movie Anaconda and anacondas killing people was the third super deadly animal on this television program. We watch a lot of these programs because they usually feature Costa Rica which is fun because most of the crocodile footage is shot not too far from here so we were waiting for Tarcoles to come on the program when instead the next two extremely deadly animals were this giant black snake that looked very similar to the one we had seen about 3 feet from us on the river. It was the same snake and it is ranked among the most poisonous and deadly to people in the world and usually doesn't hesitate to strike. If bitten the person usually dies within 20 minutes I am ever so happy I found that out after we had already returned from our trip to the waterfall or I probably would have freaked out on our way back which wouldn't have helped anyway. The next deadly animal on this program was the poison dart frog, kills within 3 hours and is deadly when it feels threatened and covers itself in a poison saliva that can seep into your skin but is most deadly when it actually enters your blood stream. I was watching this program with my host brother Clever who spent a good half hour playing with these frogs, I seriously don't know how none of us got hurt but we didn't Pura Vida. I will most likely be more careful in the future but I guess what I've learned here is that Costa Rica especially the Pacific coast of Costa Rica (it gets its own episodes of these types of deadly animal shows) is a pretty dangerous place to live and freaking out and worrying about it probably won't help much. I am now more aware of the danger and can avoid it maybe but the fact of the matter is that even though I meet with at least one of the planets most deadly animals every day that no one here has died in the last 5 years so I'm not going to waste my time fretting about it and neither should you.