Viaje Terminado

I apologize for the longer than usual lapse in posting.  We returned yesterday from our second two-week trip, which took us to Nicaragua and along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, visiting pineapple plantations, agroforestry operations and coral reefs.  The primary foci of the trip were agricultural practices and forest management.  I am going to split the trip into two blog entries because there is a lot to say (and my aunt invited me over for cafe and rice pudding this afternoon, so I have limited time).

We spent the first three days of our field trip in a riverside Nicaraguan town called El Castillo (the castle).  The town's namesake is a castle/fort atop a hill overlooking the river.  It was built by the Spanish in the 1500s to provide security for trade routes during the golden age of Caribbean piracy.  Interestingly, the San Juan river, which runs by the town, was initially considered a prime candidate for an aquatic trade shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but political strife and seismological activity spurred foreign investors to look farther south to Panama and construct their historical canal.

Our next destination was a beautiful and remote location called Giovanni's, a rustic forest lodge in the northeastern lowlands of Costa Rica.  Giovanni himself is a mysterious, manically industrious and pensive man with a mischievous sense of fun and adventure.  He has been protecting his holding of mostly primary forest for years and has made a living in everything from carpentry to butterfly farming.  He has open disdain for the trappings of modern life and talks about the minimal fees he pays for light and phone with a face as though he had just eaten something disagreeable.  Yet he has an almost childlike sense of wonder about nature, and approaches what he perceives as his given mission of forest protection with a quasi-religious fervor.  His place is beautiful and peaceful, and reminded me a lot of the Homestead, with its wood stoves, hammocks and mismatched coffee mugs.

Some of us helped grill kebabs and burgers one night, accompanied by the laughing voices of the children of Giovanni's friends and the sounds of the woods.  Everyone had worked up an appetite that afternoon swimming in a nearby river, swinging on rope swings into the water and playing around on some river kayaks, and we thoroughly enjoyed the bounty of the grill.  The idyllic joie de vive of Giovanni's was emphasized in contrast to the ever-expanding pineapple plantations that continue to replace forest and cattle farms alike in the Saripiqui area, and along the Caribbean slope in general.  The tour we took of a nearby plantation that supplies Dole with both organic and conventional pineapple left a little to be desired in the way of accurate information, and we felt thoroughly ridiculous drinking virgin Piña coladas out of pineapples at the end of the morning (though we certainly found plenty of humor in the situation).  Also, much of the decor was pineapple themed:

We persuaded Giovanni to accompany us on the remainder of our trip, the next stop of which was Cahuita, a coastal town with a National Park notable for its coral reefs.  We went snorkeling for a few hours one morning, which was awesome since I have only ever been snorkeling in the Great Lakes, and though they have cool shipwrecks, they have nowhere near the biodiversity present in the tropics. 

That's all for now (time for rice pudding!), but stay tuned for another post soon about our time with the BriBri, an indigenous group near the Panamanian border.  On an unrelated note, I will leave you with a picture of the finished retaining wall (complete with artistic improvement and beer can planters awaiting plants).

Earthbag, Mirthswag

TGIF.  Tomorrow marks our only free weekend of the entire program.  Although I entertained the idea of accompanying a few friends on a trip somewhere, I think I'm going to take a much needed break from the whirlwind nature of the program's structure and have a slow weekend of hiking and decompressing.  I wish I could camp somewhere, but almost all land is privately owned around here, which makes things difficult. We'll see.

Last Sunday I got the chance to see the nursery/reforestation project where my host dad works several days a week.  It is in the country just outside of Monteverde on land that used to belong to a handful of cattle farmers.  Being away from touristy (though beautiful and fun) Monteverde proper made me realize that I have been sorely missing open country, so it was a welcome breath of uncluttered air.  Lorenzo (my host dad) and I took a brief hike to a waterfall on the property, which was beautiful, and the cleanest I've ever seen since it is only 50 meters from the stream's source spring.  Then he took me to the station run by the reforestation foundation, which had rocking chairs on a porch overlooking the valleys to the West.  It was easily the best view I have seen in the Monteverde region and as Lorenzo said "La unica lo que falta es una cerveza en la mano."  (the only thing missing is a beer in my hand).

So far, both the experimental and control beds of lettuce seem to be growing pretty well.  It's too soon to draw many meaningful conclusions though, so we'll have to wait until after our next two week trip (i.e. three weeks from now) to see if the organic/synthetic mix is a viable alternative to 100% synthetic fertilizer.  While we're waiting, I am working mornings at the greenhouse.  Although it's repetitive work (mostly cleaning lettuce beds after harvest, removing roots and leaf litter), it's methodical and therapeutic.  Plus, working there has its benefits.  I've been able to improve my rice/beans lunches immensely with the addition of delicious cherry tomatoes and basil, and I've been able to supply pitchers of refreshing mint/lime water out to the retaining wall crew, which I've also been working with in the late mornings.

The wall project is proving hard but rewarding, and the technique is really interesting.  It's called earthbag or superadobe construction and was developed by an Iranian-Californian architect as an entry in a lunar domicile construction contest held by NASA.  It is based on the idea of using locally available materials to create housing, and did well in the NASA contest because the vast majority of the materials wouldn't have to be expensively carried by shuttle to the site, but rather collected on the moon itself.  The basic idea is that you use long bags of the material used to bag agricultural feed, stuffing them with an earth-concrete or earth-lime mix.  You build them up in layers, tamping each one and letting it harden.  Each layer is connected to the next with barbed wire, and the finished product is a dome or collection of domes (when building a house, we are just using it to build a retaining wall).  Interestingly, it has been re-pitched not as lunar housing but as an emergency shelter option in post-disaster or war-stricken areas.  It can use materials of war (barbed wire, trench dirt) to create homes, and quickly too (with community efforts).  Here's an example of a finished but unplastered structure:

And here is a picture of Michelle and Carrie working on our wall:

I am looking forward to using this technique to design a new outbuilding for our cats at the Homestead this fall so they have warm shelter for the winter (and so they don't poop all over our common spaces in the people cabins).  If you are as interested in superadobe as I am, you should check out this website:
http://calearth.org/building-designs/what-is-superadobe.html

In other news, at a coffee farm we visited recently, I saw/used a nice composting toilet!

Well, that about wraps her up for now, I suppose.  Pura vida.