Rara AvisMar 27, 2008
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Muddy road to Rara Avis
Our tractor got a flat!
Me and my sunproof shirt and hat!
| Not much time to write but I did post a couple of pics of our trek to Rara Avis, a remote rainforest reserve. It took a 5 hour boat ride and another 4 hours on the muddy track you see in the pictures to get there, in a Unimog (kind of a military truck with high clearance) with bald tires and then in the tractor drawn wagon. The tractor got a flat half way there, but we got air from a semi truck that happened to be nearby. Not sure how the semi made it up this road, though! The last hour of the trip we had the option to walk, so I jumped out of the truck and did that. The prospect of another hour of that bumpy ride and diesel exhaust was less appealing than slogging through the mud in the forest, in the rain, in the dark. We got drenched and one of the rubber boots they gave me had a hole in it, so my feet were wet, too. But they had hot coffee and cold beer waiting for us at the Rara Avis lodge. We did several hikes with Juan, one of the guides who works at Rara Avis. He's a really great guy who has a great story. He grew up in a nearby town (Guapiles, I think) and was once a poacher. All that changed when he met a visiting biologist working there (a lady biologist - he made a point of saying) who inspired in Juan a love of the plants and animals that live in the reserve and the ethic of conservation. Juan is now a walking encyclopedia of the plants and animals found in the reserve. "We need to preserve what little we have left," he says. Juan barely speaks a word of English, but managed to make himself understood by the non-Spanish speakers. |
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