HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009

Happy New Year, hope last year you accomplished most of what you worked for. Despite the widely broadcast negative financial and economic expectations for 2009, my best regards and God blessings!

Since my last note, 2 months ago, we have been enjoying the dry season we refer as "summer", despite it is technically winter since Costa Rica is actually the North hemisphere. Temperatures are warm during the day and pleasantly cool during night with virtually no signs of rain.

Because last year we spent the Holidays in Minnesota, it was wonderful to be around family; particularly that my mom and dad birthdays are also during these days. Just after Christmas, on the 26th of December, our friends Diego and Adriana, Uruguayans in Minnesota visited us for about 10 days. Below there is a series of pictures from this trip which included some volcanoes, forest, and some beach. We definitively had a lot of fun site seeing, good conversations and some good food, particularly the fruits juices were good for them.

Last Thursday (Jan 7th) in our way to the airport before they lived, there was a 6.2 earthquake with epicenter very close to our home town. Initially we thought it was something small, but during the last few days they have counted 18 dead, 64 still not found under the mudslides, over 2,500 houses destroyed. Fortunately all our family and close ones are okay, just with some damages in their houses. Below are some images from the newspaper that depict part of the catastrophe.

The 2 images below are from Monteverde Cloud forest, world famous for its immense biodiversity, but also because it is a fairly large size of forest conserved by private owners. Long hanging bridges and canopy zip lines are main touristic attractions here.

Volcan Arenal, is an active volcano. We happen to stay there overnight and saw the lava running down, although is was cloudy most of the time. We also heard it really load, as I described: "During the first 5 seconds I swear it was an airplane, during the next 5 seconds I was scared to dead". Next morning we walked were a large lava eruption ran during 1994, and were able to hear very frequently the lava rocks falling down from the top of the volcano as it continue its constant and "harmless" volcanic activity.

We visited several beaches both in the central and north Pacific. Here is Roxana eating a delicious "copo", which is sort of an ice cream made of snow-ice, syrup, covered with condensed and powdered milk. In the pictures below they enjoyed a mango in Playa Grande, a sort of solitary beach, captured by surfers during the day, and closed at night as it is the nesting place of the baula turtle, and largest species in the world, and now in danger of extinction.

That night we stayed here, at the National Park Marino Las Baulas, with the hope to see one of the most spectacular events of nature: a Baula turtle laying its eggs. Unfortunately we had the last numbers of the group, and the chance of seeing a turtle was becoming very small. Here, we waited for over 7 hours, and it wasn't until 1 AM that the second and last turtle of the night arrived. Indeed it was an spectacular moment. As the turtle enters in a ecstasies moment, she doesn't realized anybody is there, and the scientists allow the small group of tourists watch the animal having in this case 64 eggs during 5 to 10 minutes. This one was 1.48 cm long, and a very old one, they thought. According to their research, only 1 egg of 1000 will become a sexually adult turtle. No pictures were allowed, so the one of the turtle comes from the internet.

Just few miles from the Nicaraguan border on the Pacific side, we visited Santa Rosa National Park. It is known for two main reasons. First, it was the battle ground were the Costa Rican army (abolished later in 1948) defeated the "filisbustero" William Walker, a "loco" American who tried to conquer Central America around 1856. He was later killed in 1857 in his 4th attempt.

Second, Santa Rosa National Park hosts one of the few portions of tropical dry forest in the continent. During this trip, we learned a lot from Santa Rosa, given that Adriana was reading "Green Phoenix", a book that narrates how Dr. Dan Janzen, a ecology professor from Univ. of Pennsylvania carried a project for over 30 years, not only to preserve the small forest patches but to increase its area from 42 to about 500 square miles, breaking the paradigm that tropical forest can indeed be recovered to its natural state. The first picture show a section of the park over the "H" monument dedicated to the heroes of the 1856 battle. The following two show a couple interesting spiders found there.

We also visited Poas Volcano, indeed the most visited national park of Costa Rica. Although it was our first stop, I put the pictures last, because, as I mentioned above, a 6.2 earthquake (not of volcanic causes) hit this area this past Thursday (Jan 7th). The first picture is at the crater which its diameter is about 1.6 km, and mentioned as the second widest in the world. The other pictures below are around a resort/waterfalls we visited. It was exactly around this area the epicenter, and severely damaged as shown below.

This images shows at one of the water falls of the resort, from the right, our friend Diego, My mom and dad, my brother Esteban and Ana, and me.

The road from the image above is the same you see in the images below. We are in an overview point at the top of that particular waterfall.