Critters n' Things

WOW! There was sure some excitment here the other day! An EARTHQUAKE - the center of which was 20 minutes from where we were standing. over 4.5 on the Richter scale! people from places 3-and-a-half hours away were calling to see how bad the damage was as they felt it and heard it all they way out inland. Here there was a deafening roar. People shook. Buildings shook. The entire place was a buzz. Funny thing was...we missed the entire thing. Standing right in the center of an earthquake and we missed it. We were on a bus. Guess that says a lot about the roads here.

But there are lots of things we don´t miss. All the critters for example. I´ve heard of pretty much everything I´ve seen before, but, I don´t know, maybe it is the humidity or the rains that flood the towns daily, but everything is just a little weirder here. The monkeys think they are squirrels, and the squirrels think they are monkeys. The iguanas are all painted black and white as if a wet zebra slipped and fell on them. The crabs think they are frogs, hopping around. But I guess that´s ok cause the frogs here are to big and fat to hop around themselves. The hermit crabs think they are on Summer Slam, wrestling each other on the beach. The grasshoppers here are big enough to eat the birds rather then the normal way around. The sea turtles think they are bunnies, mating like mad (a very, very slow ¨mad¨that is) in the ocean. The spiders, although larger then my shoes and more colourful then a bowl of gummy bears, think they are invisible. And the cockroaches...OMG - one day I felt someone was staring at me, so I turned around to see and it was a damn cockroach. Yes, they are so big that they actually stare at you. I waved. He waved back. There are lots of dogs here - well maintained with collars, although they seem to have no individual owners. And cattle - I´m surprized by the amount of cattle here, didn´t know beef was such a big industry. I don´t know how they walk around this hilly land though. If you took all the saskatchewan cows and put them here, they´d all fall over. At the bottom of every hill would be a pile of saskatchewan cattle. That´s be the only way to tell the difference between them and the ones from here.

You´ll notice I never mentioned the infamous sloth. That´s because, like the earthquake, we keep missing them. I asked the owner of one of our many guesthouses how deep into the forest you actually have to go to see a sloth. And he looked at me in awe and said, ¨didn´t you see the one last night? he slept in that tree right outside your window from about 5 for the rest of the night.¨ Of course he did.

I don´t know where I was the last time I put something on this thing. I think Tamarindo. So I´ll start the path from there. From the beaches of Tamarindo, we headed back to San Jose, through Liberia, to take Jolene to the airport. Sean and I then headed through Puntarraines, took the ferry to somewhere else, then took a bus that was featuring ¨The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly¨dubbed in spanish, to Montezuma. After a few days relaxing from the day-long trip, we we took a taxi boat past the dophins and mating sea turtles, to Jaco and then settled in Manuel Antonino where we find ourselves now. It is beautiful setting and we find our selves very busy here. Like today, after breakfast we layed on the beach and read until finally we thought we should do something else. So we laid back and looked up in the tree tops overhead and watched the monkeys roam around for a while. Tough day.

Soon...today or tomorrow or someday...we will spend a long time going a short way again as we venture to Panama.

Hugs and smiles,
tanya