La Reserva Biologica

On Friday night Kristin, Hillary and I were seeking out an adventure-which ended up not really happening at all because everything in town was closed for some reason. Well, God listens to everything because this weekend was one of the biggest adventures I’ve ever had. I’m not sure I can even begin to explain everything but here is my best attempt. It’s really long, but read it!

Saturday morning we meet at the school and get in these vans that were going to take us to the gate of the Biological Reserve we were going to stay the night at. (You heard me right- Biological Reserve…you can tell how much I’m already just loving this since I hate biology and we’re going to the middle-of-no-where-Costa-Rica just to look at bugs). Anyways, we get in these vans and people here just drive really crazy- we’re going all over the road, semi-trucks are like a centimeter away from us, we’re running stop signs, pretty much all of my worst nightmares about driving. So we pull up to this restaurant and the driver starts telling us how he won’t drive us up the mountain to the gate of the reserve because he’s scared it will be muddy from the earthquake and he doesn’t want to get his tires dirty. Ugh. And now I understand why people get frustrated with my tendencies to be clean. Our professor can’t get ahold of the people at the reserve so we start walking up the mountain. And I mean up, up. With our luggage. Up a mountain. For 5 MILES. My friends Hillary and Mariah were walking with me and we were trying to list off all the positive things that were happening to us. I’m pretty sure we couldn’t think of anything after number 3. We get to this point where the three of us just sit on these rocks in the middle of the path trying to cool down for a minute, although we didn’t have any water left since we hadn’t been anticipating climbing a mountain. I’m about to cry because I know we still have 6 miles left to go and I know I can’t walk 11 miles uphill with a heavy duffle bag on my shoulder. We decide to continue for a couple more minutes before taking another rest when I look at Hillary and we hear the most amazing sound I’ve ever heard…a truck driving around the corner. I am really, REALLY glad it was the driver from the reserve because when he slowed down the three of us hopped in his car without even asking if he was from the reserve. That didn’t hit me until I got in the car though...slight panic moment. Ronald is my new bff. Kristin had slowed down with us at that point and here we are in the back seat of Ronald’s truck, happier than anyone will ever know!!

We finally arrived and I was extremely happy, we spent most of the afternoon just relaxing but once nighttime came around our professor started talking about all the bugs. I was pretty overwhelmed and I’ve learned that I’m more scared of big bugs than I thought. We’re standing outside in the dark looking at this white sheet type thing that bugs are attracted to and there’s at least 20 different types of insects in front of me. Kristin has really become my savior from bugs-one flew on my hood and while she was trying to knock it off for me, it flew inside of her hood…then today Mariah knocked a stinging fly/bee type thing off of me when it landed on Kristin and stung her instead…love you Kristin J Our professor was going on and on about all these diseases you can get from insects and I’m imagining all of these scenarios in my head of the bugs attacking me. Our professor told us a story about how he woke up one morning with a cockroach in his mouth, and I literally started crying. It was too much, the bugs are so huge here. We go inside and I’m starting to feel a little better when someone who works at the reserve tells us we need to shake out our sheets because there could be scorpions or cockroaches in them. Turns out there was a cockroach in one of the beds in our room L needless to say I was awake all night. I’m pretty sure I only slept 2 hours because the whole night I was just picturing cockroaches in my mouth, scorpions in my bed, snakes slithering through and flying who knows what in our room. P.S. we saw at least 4 scorpions that night in the station we were staying at. In fact, one of the men that works at the reserve showed it to a girl in our group and pretended to touch her with it, and it scared her so badly she flew out of her chair and broke it!

Okay, last part of my story, promise! We went to a waterfall which was beautiful, but the hike was super long and I have pretty bad blisters from it! Today we are leaving and the reserve people felt so bad that we had to walk so far yesterday that they offered to drive us all the way to the restaurant where our other driver would meet us. I was jumping for joy! We get maybe a mile or two away from the reserve when I hear this awful noise….we got a flat tire. Thank goodness for Jose (the only guy in our group) because he ran all the way back to the reserve to get the tools we needed. We waited for probably an hour or two playing games, but I didn’t care as long as I didn’t have to hike all the way back.  Overall, it wasn’t my favorite fieldtrip I’ve ever been on, but I loved getting closer to everyone in our group. I also get to say climbed a mountain in Costa Rica, which is pretty cool!