Day 14

Today's highlights included a challenging walk to a river and finding locally made gourmet pickles and relishes walking distance away!  We lazed around after breakfast, and then geared up for a hike to a river and Nauyaca Waterfalls.  We had to walk along the main road for 20 minutes, stepping onto the ant laden grass every time a car truck or motor bike whizzed by.   If I could only figure out how to attach more videos to this blog, I could show you the dance we do to shake ants off of our feet and ankles when we unknowingly stand on a trail or nest for more than a few seconds.  We definitely have come to the agreement that the little ones bite harder.  You can see them scrunch up their bodies and clamp their mandibles together with all their might.   On our walk down down down a steep dirt road, we enjoyed watching the columns of leaf cutter ants wind their way down tree trunks, along vines and across the road.  We observed that all the ants who were carrying bits of green leaves were traveling in one direction, while other unburdened ants went to and fro both ways.  Some of the ants had noticeably larger heads and mandibles.  We decided these were soldier ants.

Sheer wall

We also enjoyed the sheer cliff-like clay-red "wall" we were walking past.  The steepness of the path made the cliffs 20 or more feet tall at times.

As the vultures swooped only feet above us, we wound our way along the downward spiraling road.  Every eighth of a mile I encouraged us all to mentally prepare ourselves for the return hike which would be inexorably upwards, although not hurried.

Eventually we came to a sign for Nauyaca Falls,  5 kilometers..  When the kids figured out that in miles it was 3.1, they grew skeptical about hiking up all that distance.  I was secretly thinking, "This is preparing them for a Grand Canyon hike!"

After another kilometer, we reached a bridge and saw a young man coming up a trail beside the bridge from the river which passed beneath it. We crossed it and then decided we had had enough walking.  Not at all interested in complaining hikers, I made an executive decision and announced we would take a swim.

 

 

 

 

 

 Bridge over the Baru River

Swimming in the Baru River

The beach where we played

We eagerly plunged into the rain cooled waters for a while.  The current was raging and powerful, similar to the riptides we encountered at the ocean.  We set limits and safely enjoyed the refreshing break.














              We even built a sandcastle









We made the hike up much more easily than we thought we would.  We stopped and watched the ants some more, and saw the entrance to a nest.   Rose imagined that she would like to change into an ant but retain her human senses, enter an ant colony, explore the tunnels and fungus gardens and then return to human form and let us know what it had been like.


At one point on the hike back up, to my surprise, Jera suddenly jumped sideways and looked down at the road where she had nearly just stepped.  It was a very large spider with 4 of its legs raised in what appeared to be a warning gesture.   We marveled at it.  It was a very large wolf spider, although not as large as the one we had seen on our first day at Finca Ipe.  Then we noticed it was VERY still.  Could it be playing dead?  With a long stick and a safe distance, we gently nudged it, then a little harder, then quite aggressively.  If it was playing dead it was doing a very convincing job of it.   Jacob got closer and discovered that it was actually the empty dried skin of the spider after it had moulted.  That meant that somewhere out there, was a spider a little bit larger.  We carefully folded the dried spider skin inside a leaf so we could take it home with us and continued marching.

After finally reaching the road, we started homewards.  More then half-way there, we decided to check out the house which had the sign, "Pickle Ladies" in front of it.  It turned out to be owed by a pair of Canadian transplants.  After that long hot walk, the idea of a salty pickle was irresistible.  We bought a jar of bread and butter pickles, sweet pickles, mango papaya chutney and  a special treat for me, kumquat cinnamon sweet treats.  They were very good with our lunch of quesadillas.

The rest of the day was filled with listening to stories, rubbing the dry sunburnt skin off of each other's backs (gross!!) and playing Oversized-Hacky-Sack Toss.  The kids invented a game of aim in which various cooking pots and bowls are labeled with point values, and they take turns tossing and accruing points.   Due to the widely varying point structure, the winner usually ends up with 250,000 points or so.  At least it was a break from Bloody UNO.

Today we are truly initiated to Costa Rican reality.  Ants invaded the computer.  We were not happy to see tiny ants swarming out of the keyboard when we arrived home after our walk.  For a while, there were two inside the computer screen.  After several hours they seem to have all vacated the premises.  I guess I won't be leaving the computer on the kitchen table anymore.