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).
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