Pura Vida: April 2010

Another 5 day expedition to a very remote area…

After a long drive with the car, a longboat, a truck, a tractor and finally a horse we arrived in Soki, along the way we bio-monitored 4 tributaries of the Rio Uren (River).
With all the friendly indigenous people it felt a bit like being in Indonesia again. The people asked questions like; ¨How tall are you, how much do you weigh¨ and ¨Tell me about your country¨.
After they discovered the thing I was carrying was not a binocular but a camera they wanted their picture taken for a family album. It was funny to see them look so seriously in the lens.

The Sixaola River

Longboat (made out of one single tree)

Truck

Tractor

Horse

Soki

Rio Uren

Cloud forest

Hammock Where did you wake up this morning?

Everywhere in Costa Rica they play soccer, here it´s the Soki girls taking on the Soki boys.

Soki girl

Soki family picture

Very long! wobbly bridge

Rio Uren

Whole comunity comes out to see what´s happening.

Fishing (high res.)

Kid fishing

Fish identification, we had about 700 fish, 15 species, in about 100m divided up in 8 samples this time.

Data

Afterwards the usual habitat assessment.

Breakfast

Dinner

Cooking on wood, no gas or electricity here.

In category animales this time:

The Office Alien

And the local loco.

Back home in the office...

So, you´re happy to survive all this (and actually another 3 day trip earlier) and are glad to make it home safely, you´re sitting behind your computer while meanwhile somebody is landing a tree that luckily got caught on the side branches of another tree instead of sliding off the branches and crashing into my roof. Lucky to be alive!

Beyond that everybody except me has been sick for some days and at the same time there was a good swell. I got to surf a lot and at the peak of the swell I had my best session ever! Riding wave after wave for 4 hours untill I just couldn´t lift my arms any more. I had my best waves ever that sunday. The longest and fastest rides untill now. The few other people that were also in the water at Playa Negra that day were all so stoked like me. We were cheering for each other, laughing, riding wave after wave, almoust getting barreld, unbeleiveble feeling, couldn´t stop smiling for days.

Wednesday mas aventuras! We go out again for 5 days...

Pura vida!

Short expedition to explore and sample new reference sites. We use the data from the reference sites to compare them with streams that have been influenced.

We drove until we reached the Sixaola river near the Panamanian boarder and then took a boat upstream as far as we could and then started walking to reach Coroma, a small indigenous community. The people can speak Spanish but speak Bribri among themselves. From Coroma we started walking again, following a river upstream until we didn´t see any human influences anymore whatsoever. Here we conducted visual monitoring (snorkeling) and sampled macro invertebrates and did habitat assessments.

We brought a tarp to sleep under but we couldn´t resist squatting an empty house that we saw on our way to the sites and kept coming back there to sleep.