It just doesn't get any better than this...

 The 30^th of August marks what would be the most magical day of my life (until approximately a week later, but hang on that’s a different story). Our favorite boat drivers from Sierpe met us on the beach at 8am and took us on a not-as-crazy ride 17km across the ocean to Isla del Caño. On the way, we stopped at a reef just off shore to snorkel. 
The coral was gorgeous, the fish were numerous, and the water was lovely. I saw little yellow pufferfish, a parrotfish (actually maybe it was a grouper?) and a Dory. My underwater camera survived its first true test, but perhaps not surprisingly, taking pictures through snorkel goggles is a bit of a challenge, so most of the photos are clear blue nothingness. So you’re just going to have to trust me, I saw some really cool stuff. Until, that is, the jellies arrived. However, this story requires much wild gesturing, so you’ll have to wait until we’re face to face (or skyping) to hear it.Once we arrived on the island we spent the day hiking to an incredible vista, playing on the beach, and learning all about island biodiversity—turns out lectures on the beach are exactly my learning style (surprise, surprise?). On the boat ride home we saw something so cool that I cannot accurately record how excited I was. I couldn’t even breathe to take a picture (sorry for those looking for evidence). Skype me or wait til January for this story…

That night the tide came up so high that may of my friends’ tents got soaked! Luckily, my tentie, Julia, and I are camper extraordinaires, so our tent was safe. 

That afternoon our professors gave us a list of organisms and sent us on a wild goose chase (a wild coati chase?) through the rainforest, with the prize for the most interesting photos of the scavenger hunt items being an extra drink at dinner the next night. This prize never came to fruition, and being that my and Julia’s photos were the clear winners, I was quite disappointed. 

Jaguaripus juliata

A quetzal...obviously.

However, using my camp counselor intuition, I saw through this thinly veiled “educational activity” for the truth of what it was—an efficient method of getting us out of our professors’ hair for a couple hours. 

Touché guys, touché. Although we had been bamboozled, Julia and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and saw all sorts of cool things, a couple of anoles, a jaguar, and a large bird, possibly a quetzal?

Norops spp. 

All joking aside, we were quite impressed with our own tech-savvy when we used our binoculars and the extensive zoom on Julia’s camera to get a crisp, clear picture of some macaws that were nesting in a tree some miles away. 

There are macaws in that tree I swear

Because the tide had once again come in, by the time we finished our scavenger hunt and were ready to cross our little estuary and had once again become a deep rushing river. Rather than rest for an hour, miss dinner, and wait for the tide to go down Julia, myself, and a couple of our other stuck-friends left our backpacks and boots on the bank and leapt into the river. Laughing, we all made it safely across. For those of you scoffing at our decision-making (why wouldn’t we just enjoy a relaxing hour on the river bank and swim across when it was safe?) you clearly don’t know me well. Me? Pass up food? You can’t be serious.

And for those of you concerned about the belongings we left behind, (Jim and Joan) don’t worry; after dark (when the tide was lower) we headed back across the river with our professors, off the trail, and into a swamp. We found snakes, frogs, and a giant toad that made a noise like a crying baby when our professor shook it around a little bit.

We packed up our camping supplies the next morning and got ready to leave Corcovado. The boats showed up around 7am and we had them all loaded up by 8. However, the tide had gone way down since the boats had arrived, and now only a foot of water covered the sand where the river (where the boats had easily parked an hour before) emptied into the ocean. The last clean outfit I had saved for this day of traveling was quickly salt-a-fied as our entire group jumped in the river, found a good pushing spot on each boat, and shoved all three of them over the sand, out into the ocean, and scrambled aboard. After these initial shenanigans, our boat ride back to Sierpe was smooth. We boarded our favorite bus, made a quick stop at an old plantain plantation (a plantain-tion?) and arrived in a little surf town, Dominical, for lunch. Our restaurant had a ceiling made of surfboards—ones that people from around the world had broken while surfing, signed and nailed up there. Years and years of great surf stories hung over us as I enjoyed the first “American” food I’d had in a week—a bacon cheeseburger. Around 6 we arrived in…well I can’t remember what the city was called, but our hotel was fabulous. I don’t really remember much about the accommodations, but the shower was incredible. It was the first totally naked, hot shower that I’d had in a week and it was absolutely glorious. I took one upon arrival, on before bed, and one before we boarded the bus the next morning. Excessive? Absolutely not.