Rum Runners

At 8am on October 4^th, we filled up our backpacks once more and began the 10-mile trek out of the Children’s Eternal Rainforest. There was a mighty rushing river about 20 minutes in to the hike that we all crossed together (everyone made it!) and then our raucous group quickly dispersed into our various hiking paces. I found myself smack dab in the middle with my friend Julia. We spent the morning chatting about boys, school, and our families until around 10am.

Nobody fell, everyone's pack is dry, we made it!

Now before I get started with this story, I feel like I should offer you an out, so if bodily functions make you giggle, click here. If you’d rather keep your image of me in your head as a delicate little flower, keep on reading…

  

Pocosol is located up the Atlantic slope, right where the warm air from the Atlantic cools enough to loose all of its moisture before it heads over the Continental Divide. The place, which receives some rain almost every single day, is aptly named. In Spanish, “poco sol” literally translates to “little sun”. After a morning of bird lectures and delicious coffee, we all donned our swimsuits (the guard suit made another appearance!) 

Julia (my original tentmate) and Hannah (my future Belize
 roommate) next to our lake

and headed down to a little lake that we’d passed on our hike about 500m away from the station. We don’t really know how the lake got there, but our teachers promised it was free from crocodiles and poisonous snakes, so we confidently ran down the grassy shore in to the water. You can imagine our surprise, which quickly changed to delight, when we realized that this lake was not like most. There was no gradual shallow entry—where the grass met the water there was about a 4ft drop off. We passed the afternoon with cannon ball contests and headed back to the station in time for dinner, with a post-dinner statistics lecture looming over our heads.

The contest-winning photo! I call it "Jake over Johnny"

After dinner we all settled into our makeshift classroom, fighting off food comas and bracing ourselves for the driest lecture ever. I mean, let’s face it, statistics are not really that interesting unless your teacher is genetically related to me…that’s a not-so-cryptic shout out to you, sister dear.

No Laura, not you.

Alan, our head honcho professor blathered on about regression and comparison tests, making nonsense graphs on our travel white board. I pretty much zoned out for the first 25 minutes, until this phrase caught my attention,

“…so to make an interactive example of a comparison test, we’re going to compare your taste for rum to how much the bottle costs.. This will determine if your palates can pick out the best rum.” Um excuse me what did I really just hear that? I nearly fell out of my chair. “So stand up everyone, let’s head back over to the kitchen!”

Never have we ever moved so fast in our lives.

On top of the tables where we had just eaten dinner were now lettered plastic cups filled with 10 types of rum. Our task was to taste (“just a taste children, just get the flavor!”) each cup of rum and rank them according to our preference. Well, our group of college students was pretty much all over the board when it came to our preference. Some swore that cup C must be the $70 bottle, while others claimed cup J was clearly the best. After several suspenseful minutes of running our data through Excel, our teachers pronounced that two of us had A+ palates; while the rest of us ran the gamut from B+ to F. 

I’m proud to say that my taste in rum matches my college student wallet.

We then proceeded to polish off the rest of the rum not used in the statistical experiment, while learning the finer points of salsa dancing from our professors. This sentence makes our activities sound really classy, but…never mind. I’m not going to finish that sentence.

The next morning we groggily got all our packs on to a covered cattle truck, and loaded ourselves into the beds of some open-air ones. Bouncing and rocking down the dirt road (not friendly movements para una persona que tiene goma, let me tell you) my fried Alex and I practiced our princess wave to all the locals (who found our parade of gringo-filled cattle trucks hilarious) and played “I spy.” The little neighborhoods we passed looked like happy places to live, and were framed by mountains off in the distance. If I could buy about 10 plots of land I though to myself I could have my horses, and raise a family in this neighborhood! 

Once we reached the bottom of the hill we transferred our packs and ourselves on to our beautiful coach bus, and promptly fell asleep. I didn’t stir until we reached our next destination—La Selva.