Arenal Volcano

This Time Last Year

A travel day. Up at 7am, taxi at 9am, arrive at airport 10, queue until 11 and find out that I'm allowed to fly on the earlier 2pm flight. Fine. Gives me more time at Houston.

And then the flight was delayed an hour anyway!

At Houston it takes me two hours to get through Homeland Security. Just how many time do you want to take my fingerprints?

Customs make a fuss with a bottle of duty-free I have. They confiscate it and then insist I have to check-it in which means I have to pay $10 to pack it! Great.The bottle only cost me $15 dollars anyway. But it's a gift for the rest of the crew and we'll enjoy this by a camp-fire on top of a mountain somewhere. So I'm determined to go through this whole stupid process. I have to go in and out and back in through customs to do this ... and I'm taking my shoes off all the time too. Complete and utter madness.

I just about make it to the Chihuahua flight and meet Jim, Adriana, James and Catherine at the gate.

It's a short two hour flight on a small plane. Poor Jim has to fold his legs up to fit!

When we arrive at Chihuahua all our luggage comes through except my duty-free. Great. I kick up a fuss and make everyone wait. Eventually someone brings it out. I just get the feeling they were hoping I would say 'don't bother' and they could enjoy it themselves. They must have known what it was!

After a short taxi drive we arrive at our hotel. It's fine enough. We have a couple of beers and crash out.

This Time in 2007

Up at 5.30am in anticipation of an early breakfast before being picked up at 6.30 for my early morning walk in the Cloud Forest. No breakfast was available in the hotel though so I got a coffee and cake at the road-side stall across the street.

The van arrives to drive us out of town on the bumpy dirt road. We are going to the Santa Elena Cloud Forest. We arrive about 7am and have time for a coffee before donning Wellington Boots for the walk. Our guide was Jorge and we were joined by Cecilia and Nicola from France, and by Richard and Mae from Quebec.

Outside the reserve entrance we observed a row of humming-bird feeders and saw four different species here before stepping into the forest. Although the walk through the forest was very enjoyable we didn't, in fact, see very much bid-life. The recent bad weather had apparently forced many of the birds down the mountain. This included the famous Quetzels. The guide also pointed out a sloth but it was way too high in the canopy to appreciate.

Back at the Park Headquarters I had an early lunch before setting off on a walk of my own in an attempt to photograph some butterflies. In this I was quite successful and saw several new species (for me!), although it was not a big return for a walk of three and a half hours. However I was lucky to get some good clear views of the Arenal Volcano which is usually shrouded in cloud.



Back at the Park HQ I had to wait for a group to come out of the forest before catching the bus back to town.

At the hotel I cleaned my boots before having a couple of beers and relaxing.

First Day in the Garden

Garden

At last a day warm enough to work in the garden. Firstly I cleared up the front garden. This always picks up a lot of litter from the road and I had a few leaves to pick up too. It's not looking too bad with plenty of crocus already flowering and the daffodils pushing up too.

In the new back garden - which in fact is a guerilla garden as the land doesn't belong to us - I completed the edging and the pathways. I've planted a small orchard here with 2 plums, 2 apples, 1 pear and 1 peach as well as 2 crab-apples. In-between I've also planted some soft-fruit. That's 6 currants; 2 red , 2 white and 2 black, 4 gooseberries; 2 green and 2 pink. 6 Myrtle bushes and 12 cranberries. These latter are planted at the base of the fruit trees each of which is in it's own small bed. these are also under planted with 100 crocus and 50 daffodils each. These are just coming through.

The ground around the orchard I intend to be a wild meadow. So I rake over the soil and will think about when the time to sow is. I'll look at a book tonight.

Later I put some manure around all the fruit trees. This is dried cow shit pellets, so I watered it in too.

My next door neighbour has been making a lot of noise today, but I can see he is building a greenhouse. This reminds me that I still have to prepare my raised beds. When I saw my neighbour later he told me that he intends to grow tomatoes and stuff. He also told me that he's going to try raising chickens too!

This Time Last Year

Another layover day in San Jose. I did some errands. Posted some stuf to Kristine; coffee and rum! Read in the afternoon and got all my stuff ready for tomorrow.

This Time in 2007

Up fairly early and enjoyed the luxury of a hot shower. Not something I can have in Santa Ana. after an American Breakfast I decided to walk up to the Butterfly Gardens.



First, however, I located the Tourist Information Office. I booked my ride to Fortuna on Friday - the quickest way is to take a 4x4 to the shore of Lake Arenal, then a boat across the lake and then a local bus! Otherwise its a 6 hour ride. I also booked a night walk tonight and a walk in the cloud forest tomorrow morning.



The day turned out hot and dusty and quite blowy as well. Apparently it was the tail end of a hurricane. The days before I had arrived had been characterised by torrential rain.



It was a long walk to the Butterfly Garden but I amused myself by photographing a couple of species along the way. The staff at the Butterfly garden were mostly students from the USA either on sabbatical or on a volunteer holiday. They were very helpful too as I had some photographs of some species to identify. They had DeVries Volume 2, which I don't have, which describes the Metalmarks. My exotic blue turned out to be a skipper though! Amazing. All out skippers at home are small and brown!



I wandered around all four of the Butterfly Houses and spent a good four hours there. They claimed to have about 50 species, but I could only see about half that and managed to photograph 17 and I didn't bother with Siproeta or Hamadryas. Also the Sulphurs were flying too high for me to shoot.



Whilst I was back at reception I got chatting to a couple of students who were just about to leave on a field-trip - to the meadows just across the road. They invited me to join them which I did. The first time I've ever been netting with others!



It was hot out in the field and I didn't have much luck - I caught one small blue. They had more luck capturing a couple of swallowtails. These were P. thoas a black and yellow species.



I then walked back to my hotel for an afternoon siesta. At 5pm I was picked up for my night walk When I arrived it turned out I was on the wrong night-walk and should have gone with another group. Oops. But they didn't seem that bothered and I joined them anyway. I was amazed by what we saw. Some Coatis, a red and black tarantula, some bats and four types of sleeping birds. The guide was interesting too and we had a very enjoyable two hours in the forest.

On the Road to Monteverde

Gallery

Ordered some mattes from Moonshine today so I can begin to prepare for my show.

Got annoyed at the flickr site as they change they way things work. They are always throwing unilateral changes like this at us. Madness.

Took another look at Facebook and Twitter but can't see the point. Who's going to persuade me?

Chatted to Kristian about Website design and CSS and Joomla. Got to get this going.

This Time Last Year

I get up at 6.30am and wait for Luiz to arrive to take Carolyn to Fortuna. I hitch a ride to the airport. I want to change my flight for an earlier one but the 'computer says no'. They assure me that even though I only have one hour to change flights that this will be OK.

I grab a taxi back to Santa Ana and spend the morning on the internet. I call kristine in the afternnon and then settle down to watch Champions League football. Three games on the trot. Man U get a 1-1 draw with Lyon.

This Timne in 2007

Today was another travel day as I make my way to Monteverde and a small town called Santa Elena. This is close to the National Cloud Forest Reserve.

I spend the morning packing and leave some stuff in the Bodega (store room) which I hope Carlos will pick up next friend and bring to Fortuna as this is where we will rendezvous for the next trip.

At 1pm I take a taxi into San Jose city and find the appropriate bus-station abd join a queue waiting for the ticket-office to open. I spend my time playing cards with a couple of girls from Seattle who claim that they have been travelling for 30hrs so far!

The bus leaves promptly at 2.30pm for the 5hr ride to Santa Elena. Most of the trip (200km) is along the Pacific Highway but the last 35km is up and up a dirt road into the mountains. As we climbed we could se the Pacific Ocean and the Nicoya Peninsular in the distance.

At the turn-off we tiook a 15min break before taking the meandering road upwards as the sunset over the far distant ocean. We arrived in the dark to a slow drizzle.

Fortunately the Tree-House Hotel was just across the street, so I quickly got myself checked-in. Not bad for $30 a night, though other places in town are only $5! After dinner I sit down to watch Real vs Bayern.