Costa Rica~ We're flying high!

 

Freedom, after 3 months of public transportation we got our own wheels and got off the beaten tourist track with 4 wheel drive, dirt roads, and our sense of adventure.

 

We also got our poor dehydrated bodies back into the water here and are in heaven. The pink caps have hit Costa Rica.  We swam and swam, unfortunately we couldn’t see anything but our fingertips as the murk meter is at a 10 but it felt sooo good to just move through the water that we turned off our murk meters and enjoyed every stroke.

Costa Rica feels like a bilingual Maui. Our Spanish has gone to the birds as it is too easy to communicate in English and we are enjoying the easy life right now. We go places and say,’oh this feels like Kula’, or ‘this feels like Kihei’, or ‘we must be in Hana now’.  The only difference is hearing a bit of Spanish in the background and seeing monkeys and colorful birds. Did I mention that Costa Rica is clean, the infrastructure is strong and we can flush the toilet paper in the toilet not put it in a trash can next to it like we had to in Guatemala, Honduras and Belize. The simple pleasures of travel!

   

Birding has become a real fascination and challenge. We got the opportunity to go birding with a family of ‘extreme birders' in Guatemala. They had the scopes, parabola’s with 9 inch microphones, huge cameras, sound equipment and the ability to sight birds from distances beyond imagination by just hearing one peep. One thing we have learned in travel is to always say ‘yes!’ to invitations so when the Cahill's asked us to join them one morning we did.We ended up with ‘chigger bites’ all over our bodies that itched for 3 weeks but hey, we had a great time and really got an inside experience to birding. Amazing and fun. 



So the hook has been set and fortunately we have our great binoculars from our Africa trip. Plus we look the part with our white hair and geeky looking binocular straps.

We haven’t quite mastered calling out the names like ‘Look! a Buff Throated Saltator, I think it’s a juvenile by the tiny dots on it’s wings?’ We are happier making up our own names at this point, ‘look, yellow swim goggles on that  brown bird with the pointy beak that just flew away.’ Our camera has also not mastered focusing on the birds as it prefers the more stable leaves and branches that surround them. 

We tried whistling calls back to them, if they could laugh we’re sure they would have but they just flew away instead. No problem, we found some apps on our phones that make bird calls, the only drawback is that we don’t know which bird we are calling so we just push several choices to cover our bases. It doesn’t always work but we feel so professional.