| The water at the Osa Peninsula beach. Rough waves and low visibility. But warm. Not the best place for a quiet swim or much snorkelling, but still lovely. | |
| Tom, is that you taking the photo? I can't tell. I can't see anything without those glasses. Lucky I got this snorkelling mask fitted with 2 inch thick prescription lenses. | |
| A horse waiting for its rider at Las Caletas. At some point it spent the time munching on that palm. In the background is a tent set up by some people who camped a few nights when there were no open rooms. | |
| Feb 26th, Snorkelling and Cano Island: A fish with silver accents that turned shiny purple-blue when the light caught it the right way. | |
| Snorkelling: same fish. The coral wasn't very colorful, but we saw at least 15 varieties of fish that day, and mom could have stayed in the water for many more hours. We saw parrot fish, barracuda, puffer fish, boxy black fish with white polka dots, angel fish,...the list goes on. | |
| Audra's self portrait - the lenses were strong prescription lenses that she got put in for about $20 each and were much better than using contacts. Okay, so the mask weighed about 2 lbs., but it was worth it. | |
| Audra lets her life jacket loose for a moment to take a photo of Tom taking a photo of her while snorkelling near Isla Del Cano. The disposable cameras were great and inexpensive. The water was a bit murky, though, from sand maybe. Notice the stylish (read :ESSENTIAL) long sleeved, SPF 30 shirt on Audra. Tom had one, too. Sun screen washes off in salt water and sweat, as Tom's back had very painfully learned, and tropical sun will burn THROUGH SOME SHIRTS. Audra's was Ex Officio's Baja Lite shirt and Tom was wearing a Sportif Fishing Shirt. Good against mosquitos and sun OUT of the water, too. | |
| The other side of the picture of Audra taking a picture of Tom. | |
| Fish. But then, you fogured out that much already, hadn't you? | |
| Fish again. | |
| Not a very thick trunk, but look at the highrise style living those bromeliads and orchids enjoy. More so in the cloud forests, but even on the Osa Peninsula, most trees were covered in other plants, that were sometimes covered in plants themselves. Vines and roots were shot down from 10's of meters high, and often the bigger trees would look like they were covered in a few foot thick layer of soil from all the plant activity they supported. | |
| Our guide on Cano Island. A soft spoken man who like Bob Marley music, and lived an hour's walk fro Las Caletas through the jungle with his young wife and new baby girl. He told us he'd had jaguars and tapir come to his front door before, and that they would get water from a river nearby. His nearest neighbors lived a half kilometer away, and his wife and baby stayed alone when he would come to work at Las Caletas for a few days at a time. | |
| Irena lends a sense of scale to a fallen bromeliad on Cano Island. They don't sell that size at Home Depot. | |
| One of the pre-columbian stone spheres. This one was only a foot in diameter, but there were ones as big as 9 feet where tourists weren't allowed. The guide told us that they were usually (always?) found at the base of a large tree that served as a burial spot for one of the indians. There were spheres and clay pot shards just lying around at the top of the trail on Cano Island. Without climate controlled display cases and guards that told you to keep your hands off. Who knows if this is a good or bad thing. We spent one dinner trying to come up with some way we would make a sphere out of a large (even a small stone). After we got past Tom's suggestion of a giant rock tumbler, the ideas got pretty weak. | |
| Another set of stone spheres on Cano Island. | |
| A grain grinding stone on Cano Island. | |
| Our guide and a big tree. After a while, you'd forget what each of the trees were useful for, but you still came away realizing how many of them were useful. It made you see your own local trees in a different way. | |
| Tom wandering in the jungles of Costa Rica. Pretty adventurous guy. | |
| Could it get any more beautiful? An overlook point on Cano Island. | |
| Jungle and stream. | |
| Root shapes that just don't make much sense to the Tucson or Chicago brain. | |
| More massive buttressed roots. | |
| They almost have a mineral look to them, the way some mountains in the southwest have visible layers of various colored sediment. And, on the other hand, not like that at all. | |
| Cano Island vista point. Maybe having to kneel half the day grinding grains isn't so bad when you get to see this view, too. Then again, maybe it is. | |
| Tom and Audra having conquered the jungle. Well.....okay, having been bitten by bugs, lost glasses in the ocean, burned to a blistery pink sheen, etc., etc. | |
| Las Caletas and adjacent beaches from the snorkelling boat trip. | |
| Feb. 27th: The airport at Palmar Sur. They care much less about carry-on metal items than they do your weight for balancing out the plane. | |
| The last day in Costa Rica, we took a really small plane out of Palmar Sur - 6 seats, Tom got to sit in the navigator's spot. Even our day packs had to be put in the luggage hold. Also one of the most bumpy plane rides any of us had ever been on - Audra would like to thank the makers of Dramamine. |