Santa Elena, May 17th

The past week has been a whirlwind, folks. I’m sitting in my hotel room in Santa Elena feeling very happily tired. In La Fortuna, I hiked out to see the waterfall, and I have to say that it was vale la pena—worth the effort and then some! Very, very beautiful. Obviously a heckuva lot smaller than Niagara, but with the added bonus that you can swim in the crystal-clear pool at the bottom of the cascada. I’ve never seen water that clear before…I clambered over some rocks for a while before I decided that doing so in bare feet was probably not the best idea, so I wound up just sitting on a rather flat rock for a while with my feet in the water, the mist on my face, and the thundering sound of the water in my ears. Unbelievably peaceful! I hope I remember that feeling for a long time.

The ride to Santa Elena from La Fortuna was even bumpier than the ride from Sámara to Montezuma. (Remember that one? Insane!) I had the extreme fortune, though, of riding with four Spainards. Bonus time for me! #1, they spoke Spanish and not English, and #2, now I know that I can understand Spainards. You know what this means? I’m goin’ to Spain, baby!!!! This is why I’ve spent all this time and effort on learning Spanish. So I quite enjoyed the trip despite the noggin-crushing roads.

In Santa Elena, I saw the Jardin de Mariposas (butterfly garden) and the Jardin de Orquídeas (orchid garden). Both were sublime—I lucked out and got a one-on-one tour in Spanish with the mariposas and toured the orquídeas with two wonderful lady doctors from New York. The guides were fantastic and really made the tours interesting. Even got some good photos of those ever-flitting butterflies! That took some patience…

Santa Elena, day 2: toured El Trapiche. (The trapiche is the press they use to squeeze the juice out of sugarcane.) The tour included everything from a tour of the farm—sugarcane, coffee plants, banana trees, papayas, mangoes, chayote, you name it—to demonstrations of how coffee goes from the branch to your cup and how sugar is produced. We ate raw sugar cane and freshly-roasted coffee beans, drank fresh coffee and agua dulce (my fav!), made our own candy, and drank the freshly-squeezed cane juice. It was all very yummy and exceedingly interesting. Did you know that sugarcane is closely related to bamboo? Looks just like it. And your average plant is 50% sugar and 50% water, so you have to boil it down to extract the sugars. I love the smell of the cooking sugarcane! Very aromatic. After that tour, I went off to the cheese factory in nearby Monteverde, where I got to see how everything from cheese to sour cream is made. Included a lot of history of the Monteverde area and also the Quakers, because they were the ones who started the whole thing 55 years ago. The guide was (again!) fantastic, and he was stunningly bilingual due to the fact that his parents were Ticos but he had grown up in Wisconsin. Even though the other 15 people on the tour were American, he did parts of it in Spanish for my benefit, which was muy amable of him. I really enjoyed that tour. (And the cheese tasting at the end.) Quite the culinary day!

Yesterday I went hiking in the Monteverde Cloud Forest. It is way, way up there, so high that it is literally in the clouds. It’s a very dreamlike experience to hike through incredibly lush trees whose tops are shrouded with floating patches of mist. It’s also rather hard on your legs to climb up that high when you walked downhill 2.5 miles from the cheese factory to your hotel the previous day. (And when I say “downhill,” I mean Tico-style downhill, which is a 45-degree incline.) Turns out that walking downhill is much harder on your joints than walking uphill. Oiy. But the forest was so beautiful that I almost didn’t notice the unhappiness of my left hip.

Today I went hiking in the Santa Elena reserve. Smaller than Monteverde, but all the more personal because of that—rather than imposing suspension bridges, it has very narrow, winding trails and unseen, burbling streams. I liked both. And the only time I ran into anyone at all today was when I stumbled upon a German tour group. Another bonus language round for me! That was a nice surprise.

Throughout all of this, I perused various art galleries, sampled the best ice cream I’ve ever had (sorry, Breyer’s, the Monteverde cheese factory has you beat), had many insightful cultural conversations with taxi-cab drivers, and found a restaurant that rivals Casa Zen in Mal País: Moon Shiva in Monteverde. !Ricisimo! It’s Mediterreanean, which means tons of wonderful veggies and a lot of garlic. My salad came with an entire head of roasted garlic. I’d forgotten how much I miss that! Ticos don’t season their food as much as what we’re used to. I was in heaven in Moon Shiva…

I ventured out to the bar right next to my hotel last night and found a live cumbia band. As it turns out, cumbia is pretty similar to salsa. I also came across another Tico who could dance, though not as well as the Vince-Vaugh prof in Sámara. All in all, it was a really fun night, much better than I had thought it would be. There was, of course, the obligatory borracho (drunken sod) who was trying to dance with all the ladies, but I managed to steer clear of him. There was also another guy who tried to dance with me—the fact that his hat was bigger than his head was a bad sign—but I figured out a way to get rid of him, too: lead him. Latin guys do not like it when the woman takes over command like that. They won’t admit that you’re leading them, though, because that would be admitting that they don’t know what they’re doing. What a great way to get a bad dancer to never dance with you again! Why didn’t I think of that before? Fabulous! Just glad I found one after that who was fun.

Tonight I think I’m going to chill and pack for tomorrow’s trip to Libéria. I have accumulated quite a few extra items at this point, so this is going to have to be quite strategic. My textbooks alone weigh a fair amount. Good thing I like to organize things…

By the time you read this, I’ll probably be in Libéria and preparing for my flight back to the good ol’ U.S. of A. This has been quite the experience! Much, much different than Europe, and not just because it’s a different language. Latin America most definitely has a flair of its own; glad I got to experience a little bit of it. And learning Spanish has been a fantastic challenge for me. I was itching to go off on a new adventure! Wonder what the next one will be? Hmm…Panamá, maybe, until the Euro goes down and Spain is more afforable? Vamos a ver… (We’ll see…)

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my updates half as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. Thanks for tagging along!

I’m looking forward to seeing you all again!

And, of course, for the last time, the quintessential Tico sign-off: !PURA VIDA!