Tuesday, July 02, 2019

Costa Rica II

    I should probably talk now about...the earthquake!
    About 11:30pm on our final night in Cahuita, while I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in the sticky heat, suddenly the room started to move.  Being a 25 year West coast resident, I have been through a number of earthquakes before so it only took a second for me to snap awake and realize what was going on.  By the time I managed to scramble out from under the mosquito netting and croak out a feeble "It's an earthquake!", it had already stopped, not having even been strong enough to knock over anything in the room.  Becky was also instantly up, but somehow the kids both slept right on through it and our frantic ensuing discussions.
  Now, for those who don't know, I'm a paranoid, earthquake preparedness freak (read: worrier) who has been obsessively studying the dangers for all of those 25 years in the northwest.  The earthquake felt weak where we were, but we were only a hundred yards or so inland from the beach--I knew terrifyingly well that if the epicenter was somewhere offshore of us there could be a deadly tsunami sweeping our way, one that could land anywhere from a few minutes to maybe even several hours later.  Knowing Costa Rica is earthquake-prone, I had actually even previously researched routes from where we'd be staying to the nearest high ground to be sure it wasn't more than a few minutes drive away.  Now this was the horrifying nightmare I had tried to prepare for come to life.  Needless to say, I felt a wave of complete panic.  The kids were asleep--should we wake them now?!  How could we find out where the epicenter was?!  Becky was trying to get online, but having trouble with the weak wifi. Our car was parked behind a locked gate (standard security in Central America), so to flee wasn't even possible without getting the proprietor up to let us out, and he was shut up with his family inside his darkened house next door.  And how could we flee and not try to warn the other people?
   I went outside.  Everything was quiet and dark all around--no one in the neighborhood seemed to have been stirred by the whole thing at all.  I could hear the waves crashing on the nearby beach as I paced on the paved walkway outside our cabin trying to think straight.  I walked over to the proprietor's door, looked at his doorbell for a long few seconds, then chickened out and walked back again and stood outside our door.  "No, I have to wake them.  I will be the crazy, paranoid guest disturbing them in the middle of the night, but that's what I have to do."  My mind finally made up, I went back over and pushed his doorbell.  No noise from inside. I waited a half minute then rang it again.  After a few long seconds more, there was finally a scruffling sound inside, footsteps and then he emerged half-dressed onto the porch.  Thankfully, he took my panicked questions in stride.  Yes, he had felt the earthquake, and had already been online and determined that it was centered down in Panama.  Panama?  We were actually not that far from the Panamanian border, so I didn't know whether to feel reassured.  He accommodatingly stepped back inside his door and returned with his iphone, where he showed me a geologic organization website that already had a map pinpointing the quake and listing it as a 6.2--it was centered not far from the Costa Rican border, but on the other side of the country, the Pacific side (Panama is only about 80 miles wide at that point), so there was no way that could generate a tsunami to hit our side.  Almost giddy with relief, I thanked him and headed back to our cabin to fill Becky in on the situation and try (mostly failingly) to get some sleep.
    When told about it all the next day, the kids were of course somewhat disappointed to have slept through it--their first earthquake.  But I for one was incredibly thankful that they had missed it all.


While in Cahuita we also visited a nearby sloth rescue sanctuary, which included a tour of the care facilities, a lot of info about the 2 kinds of sloths in Costa Rica (2-toed and 3-toed), and a canoe ride on the side channels of the adjacent river.  This is one of the awake 3-toed sloths (2-toed are nocturnal and were all asleep while we were there).  
We also saw several sleeping sloths up in trees out in the wild at various places.  And additionally I should mention here that we also saw toucans, eyelash viperskinkajous (at night in a tree), and even a tapir during our time in the rainforests.

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On to the Central Highlands!

  After a sometimes harrowing trip over some sketchy mountain roads, we arrived back in the Central Valley, home to San Jose and the vast majority of the country's population.
The adults got in a photo in the central plaza in downtown San Jose.  We went into the downtown just one afternoon to go to a museum and so the kids could see the hustle and bustle of the center.



In the small highlands town of Sarchi, where we stopped for lunch one day, there is this famous garden in front of the local church where the bushes are all trimmed into various interesting, and sometimes bizarre, shapes.  These two are just a small sample.


When Becky and I were in Costa Rica back in 2003, we were fascinated by a trip we made to the Arenal volcano which was active then and where you could actually view glowing red lava and rocks blowing out of the top of it at night.  Unfortunately, its has gone quiet again now, so we couldn't take the kids there.  Instead we decided to try a trip over to look down into the crater of the Poas volcano, which was supposed to at least have steam and smoke rising from it's center.  It's tightly controlled and you have to make reservations beforehand for a specific 20 min. window of time at the observation platform--that's all you get and you have to hope for decent weather or you're just out of luck.  Well, we were just out of luck.  Below is how it turned out for us:  cold, windy, and clouded-in so thick we couldn't see anything below the rim of the crater.  The exciting stuff is somewhere behind us in the clouds in this photo.

At the La Paz Waterfall Gardens (beautiful but pricey) the kids posed with some oxen and traditional oxcart that were harnessed up for display.  Coincidentally, that very morning we had driven around the corner on a twisting mountain road and suddenly had to veer around an old man actually leading oxen with a cart like this up the paved road, like he had just time-traveled in from the 1800's.  Don't have a clue where he came from or where he was going like that among all the cars and trucks.



At La Paz they had also put out hummingbird feeders, and they were absolutely swarmed with various species of hummingbird (there's apparently 50 species in Costa Rica).  The video doesn't really do the whole scene justice, unfortunately.



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