Saturday, Feb. 21: Carara National Park

This morning was bright.  I woke up at the usual Corcovado time (5:30) so I didn’t get much sleep.  I did get to shower in a real shower, which was really nice.  We had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which was literally right on the beach.  I could reach down and touch the sand.  After breakfast we headed on the bus to Carara National Park.  It was ok, really hot, and not nearly as pretty as Corcovado.  We also met Richard, the Costa Rican bat expert who is going to be with us for the rest of the trip (little did we know at the time just how BAMF Richard is).  We had pizza hut for lunch, but it was just ok.  Everyone else seemed more excited than I was.  We weren’t at Carara for very long, only a few hours.  Then we got back on the bus and headed to Santa Rosa National Park.  Shortly after we left we stopped on a bridge to see these HUGE crocodiles.  The biggest ones were 4 or 5 meters long.  It was really cool.  Then back on the bus. I pretty much slept the rest of the ride.  We stopped for a little while in Liberia, a city close to Santa Rosa.  It was nice to have some time in civilization, and check my email.  It was dark when we got to our campsite in Santa Rosa and we couldn’t see a thing.  Other people had gotten there earlier that day to set up the main camp, but we had to set up our tents in the dark.  This is right after we were told there are a lot of snakes around.  Awesome.  From what I can see so far, I’m not too impressed.  It’s super dry, and looks just like Wisconsin, except with more snakes, spiders and cockroaches. Huge cockroaches.  The bathrooms are really far away, and they seem like some man is going to jump out and grab you.  It’s really eerie.  Apparently there’s also fire ants everywhere.  We were told to watch out for them before we set up our tents, but it’s so dark we can’t really tell if our tent is on an ant mound or not.  At least Sarah and I have a big tent this time so we don’t have to sleep on each other and our bags.