So all the students are heading back home today. It has been a little sad saying goodbye to the friends that I have made this semester, but I know that we all have exciting lives to look forward to. I will likely cross pathes with that other ecologists.
I throughly enjoyed my time in La Selva. There is a beautiful variety of old growth and secondary forests, lots of snakes and frogs, and howler monkeys. Definitely recommend La Selva to anyone traveling to Costa Rica.
After La Selva, we spent two nights at Rincon de la Vieja, a sort of active volcano in northern Costa Rica. When hiking up the volcano, the elevation changes from 600 to 1900 meters. And I know that different plants grow at different elevations, but seeing the change happen during a 3 hour hike was incredible. We started in a dryish forest that looks a lot like a temperate forest in Arkansas at the begining of spring. Then palms gradually filled up the forest. Then, really suddenly, forest canopy dropped and instead of the diversity you normally see in tropical forest, there were only two or three tree species. Then we reached the top of a ridge that only supported shrubs with thick leathery leaves and small plants. At the very top of the volcano, almost to the crater, it was unbelieveably windy and rainy. So windy that I felt like I would topple over and so rainy that I could barely see 10 meters in front of me. And (yeah, it gets better) all the rain stung with sulfer from the volcano. It was a very dramatic ascent and absolutlely worthwhile.
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