A brief glimpse of life in Providencia

(Please note: story begins below, see previous posts. Also, internet is too slow and expensive for photos so you will have to wait)

After our first day hiking into Providencia, life became pretty good. We worked the next day on the school under construction which is a wood framed building from materials harvested in the area right next to the roaring stream. It´s a cool building, creatively built though certainly not up to the standards of construction that we´re used to. There is also a small bouldering wall inside the main room, and we had a good time climbing around on the handmade wooden holds that Eric and his daughter have made. Mostly our work over the next several days was mixing concrete with shovels on the ground. Not the most pleasant stuff in the world. Then we would build walls of rock and concrete in wooden forms. At least the days weren´t too long.

After one day of work, however, Saturday arrived, which is the day off for Eric and Ying because they are 7^th Day Adventist. It was a good, long, tiring day. Most of the late morning & early afternoon we spent trying to boulder on this rock they dubbed the Puma Boulder. It was fun, although the routes were challenging. After a few hours we went to what´s called a Strangler Fig tree. It´s a type of tree that starts growing on another tree, eventually killing the original tree and continuing to grow more like a vine then a tree. The original tree dies and the network of the vine-like trunk stays alive and flourishes. When the original tree rots, the inside of the Strangler Fig is hollow. So picture a tree that is 100 feet tall consisting of a vine-like but sturdy trunk that is completely hollow. And yes you can climb it, which is what we did, all the way up the inside of the trunk like a ladder to where the branches start spreading outward. We climbed through a hole and sat on the branches way up in the jungle canopy. Certainly one of the most amazing tree experiences ever.

The following week was more of the same, work on the school, eat good food, put up with the annoying quirks of our hosts, all in all content. After a little more than a week, we moved to another house, which was truly a special experience. Our new hosts were a Tico family who have owned a farm in Providencia for 30 years. They have coffee, grenadillas (a wierd fruit related to the Passion Flower vine), avocadoes, bananas, and a small veggie garden. We stayed for 5 or 6 nights with them, helping on the farm in the morning and walking an hour to the school to help out a bit in the afternoon. In those few days, our Spanish improved (because we were actually using it), we picked coffee one morning for several hours, weeded a flower garden another morning, and hiked up the mountain road to collect wood on a another morning. They also roast their own coffee in a metal bowl on their wood fire stove. The cabin we stayed in was rustic with a toilet, and the family was so wonderful. We may try to go back at some point, without the commitment to the school. But we shall see.

Our last day we woke up at 4 am, at 5 am started walking to the center, arriving at 6. We began our walk at dark and the duration provided us beautiful vistas of the dawn and the subsequent sunrise, arriving at our destination in full light. From there we rode in the back of truck with buckets of blackberries for an hour up the mountain to Ojo de Agua, where we caught the bus to San Isidro del General. After a few hours, we then took a bus to Dominical, a very chill beach town where the Pacific is warm, the sand hot, and there are more tourists than locals. It is very tranquilo and beautiful, but I must say it is a bit of a shock after being in a rural village with only Ticos and a few unique gringos. But swimming in the ocean is so wonderful, and so here we are for the next few days. Adios.