Sunday, Feb. 22: Day 1 in Santa Rosa

So far I’m not a huge fan.  It’s so dry hardly anything is green.  At least there’s a breeze so it’s not quite as hot, but at night when the wind blows through the tents it sounds like there’s a tornado outside.  It’s a lot more “roughing it” than Corcovado.  No shelter, only tents and tarps.  We still have cooks, but no kitchen, they have to cook for 35 people over a fire.  That sucks.  At least there’s Marco, one of our cooks who is our age who is really gorgeous and has a really cute butt.  He’s definitely gay, but still good eye candy.  Whenever we get cranky we stare at him to make ourselves cheer up.  This morning was so boring.  We walked around for four hours doing species reports.  We were not happy campers, everyone was soooo cranky.  The only exciting thing was the howler monkeys right above our camp.  The baby was so cute and they were so close.  We have free time from 1-3 because that is the hottest part of the day.  The afternoon was more species reports, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected.  The two hour break was good for everyone, we were all a lot less cranky.  We ended up only doing 3 species reports, then heading up to the monument.  Moncho is a dirty liar and told me we were doing species reports all afternoon.  The historical monument was really cool.  It’s a huge Casona, and it used to be a huge cattle ranch.  The Casona is actually a remake of the original, because someone burned down the original building in 2000.  Tania have us a history lesson of Santa Rosa, but I was spacing out the whole time (oops). I just know there was an epic Costa Rican battle here.  Then we walked up to the lookout to see the volcanoes.  It was so pretty!  We even got to climb on top of this structure they have there that you probably aren’t supposed to climb on.  It was really tranquilo.  I even saw Polistes there (my species report)!  After that we had a delicious spaghetti dinner and a discussion of these articles we had to read.  It was kind of boring.  There are these tiny gnats everywhere so I got really bitten up.  It’s awful, they make you bleed when they bite, and then the bite gets really swollen.  We all look like lepers.  What an exciting night, I’m going to bed at 8:30.