My Sister & Her Machete

Everything is good here. Today is a bagaces day for me. I'm going grocery shopping soon because it ' s my turn to make dinner. I'm making breakfast ....for dinner.

So my last two days in the field were pretty sweet. I got lost alone for the first time, awesome. All of the sudden Juanca (a 33 yearl old Tico that i work with) yells 'Intergroup!!!!!' and he and this girl Katie start RUNNING down the steep hill we are on. An 'intergroup' is when the group of monkeys you are with that day comes into contact with a separate group of monkeys. Same species and everything, just a different group. It gets crazy, sometimes just a lot of screaming and running, sometimes it gets bloody and warlike. So it's a very interesting and exciting thing to witness. This would be my first. So I'm pumped and start running behind them (the monkeys run super fast when this happens so we couldn't see them, just hear all the screaming).

Then I fall and slide down on my ass about 20 feet, and end up tangled in vines when I finally stop. Every time I moved, the tangling got worse. Like a bug in a spider web. My machete was all stuck in tangles, every loop on my backpack was twisted up in vines, and my legs and arms were stuck. It was pretty hilarious if you weren't me. But I had a bit of trouble getting myself out, so I missed the intergoup, and lost the two people I was out with. Awesome. I did find them after about 45 minutes, so that was alright.

I also saw my first boa constrictor two days ago. It was 6 feet long. The monkeys LOVE alarming at snakes, so it's helpful to know where the snakes are. The monkeys just all mob around it and yell their snake alarms, so you can tell exactly where the snakes are. Also a good thing for us.

Yesterday it rained for 5 of the 14 hours we in the forest. That was sucky. It rains HARD here. Like nothing I've ever seen. It's nuts. We can't take any good data on the monkeys in the rain because they go high up in the trees and visibility is poor. So we just have to babysit them...follow them around, sloshing through the mud soaked to the bone. Luckily this one kid Isaac is HILARIOUS and kept me laughing hysterically the entire time. Which is good because it might be hard to laugh after sliding down a muddy cliff on your ass and getting stabbed by acacia trees and bamboo all along the way. Right after I slipped down a cliff and was trying to keep up with this guy Joey who SPRINTS everywhere, even in the pouring rain, I was climbing over the roots of this GIGANTIC old Pichote tree that's all twisted and creepy looking and lowering myself down to the ground because there was a bit of a drop on the other side. This tree, like a lot of old trees in the forest, had this big gaping hole in its base, but was so huge that the hole is as tall as me, making it like a cave. I guess from me climbing on the roots and causing a disturbance, swarms of bats starting flying out of the hole!! I had to duck a little and it startled me at first, but it was sooooooo awesome to watch. Such a cool thing to be alone in the forest in Costa Rica and get to see something like this. There were so many of them. And they just took off.

So everything is great. Every day is a really cool adventure of some sort. Gotta go grocery shopping; also an adventure because of my terrible Spanish.