He Vuelto a Monteverde

Que pasa, interweb?  It's been a while.  We returned last night from our two week trip along Costa Rica's Pacific Coast.  It was jam-packed, with each day scheduled from 7am til around 9pm.  That said, we did get a few nice breaks, especially to enjoy the small beach town of Playa Grande.  The trip was bookended by visits to hydropower plants.  We began our travels in the Northwest, where we visited Lake Arenal, a man-made reservoir, and learned about the dam system that created it.   We heard about many of the dam's ecological effects, including changing dynamics among fish populations and water diversion from the Atlantic to the Pacific slope.  Interestingly, Costa Rica is atypical in that 80% of its electricity is generated by hydropower (compare to roughly 15% in the U.S., which is still proportionally high in global terms).  ICE (the government controlled electricity and telecommunications company) is about to begin construction on a new dam that will double the nation's energy capacity.  It is called the Diquis project and is located in the Southwest.  We spent yesterday learning about it from ICE's perspective and then spent the afternoon talking with schoolchildren and community members in a the town of Ceibo, which will be entirely submerged when the dam is built.  It was a sobering afternoon, but practicing our Spanish with the kids helped us keep a hopeful attitude.  It's true, after all, that ICE is undertaking an incredible variety of projects designed to ease social and ecological costs incurred by the Diquis dam, but it is still clear that with repercussions on such a grand scale, it is near impossible for them to navigate the transition smoothly.

We also visited sites of high geothermal activity.  One was within a National Park and the other was nearby, but outside of the park's boundaries.  Consequently, this latter is now the site of a geothermal power plant.  It will be interesting to see what happens with the geothermal sector in CR, as only one plant currently exists, but areas with geothermal potential abound.

In the middle of the trip, we visited Palo Verde National Park, which includes lots of wetland habitat that is ideal for birding.  There are 850 avian species that call CR home for at least part of the year, and in just three hours with the help of three expert birders, small groups were able to spot over 50 of them!  It was undoubtedly nerdy, but just as undoubtedly fun, and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more about temperate species (I'm sad to say I could only identify around ten birds total prior to Bird Day).

We then spent three days on Isla Chira in the Gulf of Nicoya, which was a welcome break from the 3 restaurants a day, hotel-hopping spree of the first week.  We stayed in a homey, rustic lodge made up of cabins and a small semi-enclosed dining hall.  It was nice to be able to do some sink laundry and relax in the woods.  While on the island, we visited two similar local groups involved in fishing and clamming.  The artisanal (hook-and-line) fishing group has been really successful in establishing sustainable practices in their protected area of the Gulf, and have been hailed as a model for other communities trying to do the same.  The clamming group, on the other hand, met with initial success but had lots of problems with protecting their clamming grounds after a series of news media promos brought a lot of poachers to the area.  Sadly, much of this downturn has to do with the fact that the group is run by women, and the men poaching the clams do not respect their authority when they patrol.  The women have changed gears from clamming, or "piangua"-ing, to offering tours of the mangroves that provide clam habitat, incorporating clam digging into them as well.  It was a definite highlight of the trip.  We all suited up and squelched thro ugh the mud, jumping nimbly (or not-so-nimbly) along the tough but pliable gigantic root systems of the mangrove trees in search of clams.  Once back on the boat, we had delicious clam ceviche (similar to pico de gallo), easily the best dish I've had since arriving in the country.

On the subject of food on the island, we also ate beans prepared in this super cool solar cooker:

This post is getting pretty long, I suppose.  Breifly, then, other highlights included our bus breaking down on the second to last day and getting stranded outside of a tuna factory for a couple hours.  It was during this time that we ate at a soda (i.e. cafe) that gave many of us indigestion (three cheers for Tums).

Fortunately, zen average held and we were rewarded the following morning with an early morning breakfast cruise along a beautiful river.

We start internships tomorrow, so I'll be learning lots about hydroponic gardening, which I'm looking forward to.  Now I'm off to put some pages behind me in the mediocre Spanish novel that I have a quiz on in two days.