Arrival

First, a couple pictures to illustrate Matt's post from the other day.

This is the Rainbow Eucalyptus that we saw being logged in the park, and below is a pile of the trees.

Apparently they're non-native but used commercially for making paper, so that may be why they were logging them.

Now onto current adventures. Yesterday we arrived at Cloudbridge after a day of traveling that culminated in an old school bus bumping up a dirt road for an hour and a half to arrive at the end of the bus line in San Gerardo. In San Gerardo we met Tom, the reserve manager, who loaded us into his pickup to continue bumping up the dirt road for another couple miles. We're pretty remote here considering how slow the roads are, but distance wise I think we are only 15 miles or so from San Isidro, where we caught the bus. Google is not very helpful in telling me the distance, as it doesn't recognize that there is even a road that goes to San Gerardo.

After a brief tour of the buildings and an introduction, Tom left us to settle in. We are staying in the Casa, the main volunteer/researcher house. It has space for 4 (our double bed and two twin beds in another room), and for now we are sharing it with Veronica, a French woman who is here studying orchids. Tomorrow she will be giving a presentation about her work here, before leaving Saturday. After that it sounds like we will have the place to ourselves for a while - there will be some other volunteers coming in the next week or so, but I think they will be staying in Cabinas up the hill. We have a kitchen and a bathroom with hot water, as well as a mini-fridge (exciting because until recently there was no refrigeration here). Here's our room from our deck:

And our deck from our room:

The view from our deck looks across the canyon into old growth forest. I'm sitting here now, hoping to see a monkey!

Today we went for a hike to explore part of the reserve, before retreating home before the afternoon rain. This will probably be our normal schedule... since it's entering the rainy season we can expect rain essentially every afternoon. The reserve is beautiful - the Chirripo River runs through the middle (and right next to our house, it's a little deafening out on the porch), and so far we have already seen three gorgeous waterfalls. It looks as though we're going to need to be very self-directed here. Tom seems hands-off anyway, and is also leaving next week for two months. It's scary, but hopefully we'll figure it out as we go! This afternoon we're hoping to have a look at what sort of data is already available, both on the computers and in the research library.

That's it for now! We sent a SPOT today, but if you didn't get it, click here to see where we are in Costa Rica!