To Costa Rica, Then The Amazon 12-15&16-2010

My computer has been in the shop for the last week being exorcised of a whole slew of viruses, so I've had lots of time to think, but no chance to get my blog started. At last, here we go!

December 15 - Aloft! Finally, after months of planning, map examining, and googling such things as dugout canoes, the Amazon River and pink river dolphins, then spending hours weighing, packing and repacking my carry-on luggage, getting yellow fever shots and visiting travel sites.....I was at last on my way.

The first part of the trip felt familiar, the journey to El Remanso Wildlife Lodge in Costa Rica is, by now, a part of my beaten track since I've been there many times. But it never loses its allure, and I was so glad to be headed to the warm perfume of the tropics from 20°F., blustery, wintery, Oregon.

The first image above, taken from my plane window, is Mt. Hood (Oregon) from the southwest, shrouded with clouds but with its telltale lenticular (lens-shaped) cloud floating above like a halo.

The journey started at 1am in the Medford, Oregon airport, when Dan'l delivered me to the near-empty airport for the first leg of my trip: Medford-Portland-Dallas/Ft.Worth-San José, Costa Rica. The plane wouldn't leave Medford until 5am, but that meant I had to be there by 3am (for international flights you're supposed to appear 2 hours before the flight) and I didn't want Dan missing sleep because he had to work the next day. So I slept as best I could through the every-four-minutes-I-timed-them announcements to tell me to Watch My Bags, Ask My Airline What Should Be In Carry-on Luggage, Pack My Own Luggage, and other Embecilic Messages offered for midnight consideration while people are trying to sleep. Egad!

But enough complaining. The rest of the flight went just great, with time for sketching and lots of cloud-watching. One of the best things that happened was the $35 I splurged on a massage in a little concourse spa in Dallas/Ft.Worth. I recommend it highly.

I arrived in San José well after dark, but I had arranged for my hotel, Dunn Inn, to send a car for me, and the driver was waiting with a sign that said "Irene" on it, so I could relax and let the driver do all the work. That cost me $25, and was well worth it. Parlaying with taxi drivers in Espanol (mi Espanol es mal) is pretty tricky.

Dunn Inn a good little hotel, clean, with a pleasant staff, and not expensive. Here's my room from the hall, and my two carry-on pieces, sketchbook and camera, plus a suitcase full of goodies for Adriana and Daniel at El Remanso.

The next morning after a quick breakfast, I snapped a photo of the front of the hotel (it looks much like an ordinary house except for the hanging sign) as my hotel driver took me to the Sansa airport. That's my plane in distant center. I didn't count, but I'd estimate there are 16-20 seats in it. I love flying in small planes, and it was an unusually smooth trip. I was sketching a good part of the way.

Upon arriving at Puerto Jimenez, I noticed a pair of toucans gobbling up ripe papayas in a tree right next to the Lodge's airport office. I sketched and photographed them while waiting for my ride to El Remanso, about half an hour. Can you see the toucan? The orange oval in the clump of papayas is the stem of a papaya that was entirely consumed.

Adri had warned me that the rains had left the road to El Remanso a morass, but I had no IDEA! We were hub deep in mud a couple of times, and had to cross two rivers with water high enough to make the engine steam. It was exhilarating, and we arrived safely, having spotted lots of birds, this capuchin monkey in a palm tree, and great curassows in the treetops (more about them later).

After warm greetings, Adri showed me to my room, the spare bedroom in their house (we're distantly related ~ not everyone is so royally treated) which I was pleased to discover had an airy deck with table and chair that I could use while sketching and painting.

In the two years since I'd been there, they've been busy making the place look fabulous, with a new cabina perched out over a jungly ravine and lots of beautiful landscaping. I couldn't stop admiring the gorgeous flowers, hibiscuses, heliconias, palms, and hundreds of things I couldn't even come close to identifying.

And as always, the tree-top jungle view from the restaurant railing was absolutely stunning, with trogons, blue-throated golden-tail hummingbirds, toucans, squirrel cuckoos, scarlet-rumped caciques and many other birds, butterflies, and other creatures flying through or perching on branches just a few feet away.

Right away I started sketching: a lovely soft brown tiger moth they'd saved for me, and a huge paper wasp nest hanging over the Observation Point chairs (nice wasps, not stingers). And then, the turkey-sized Great Curassows wandered past (see the image at right)! My tropical journal sketching adventure was well and truly launched.

In past blogs I have included all the sketch pages I did on the journey. This time, though, I'll illustrate this blog mostly with my photos (plus a few journal pages to give it flavor), but I'll save the majority of the sketches for my upcoming e-journal Journey to the Osa and the Amazon, which I'll offer for download on my sketch journal site. Hmmmm...... I may give it a different name. Like, Daring Journey to Darkest Peru, or something dramatic like that.

I plan to make a tutorial for it, too, showing the scenes I was sketching, decisions I made to create the pages, design problems I ran into, the mistakes I managed to gloss over, and photos of the marvels I didn't get a chance to sketch ~ which were legion! And since the second part of the journal covers my trip to the Amazon (an amazing journey of discovery), there will be lots of new stuff.

I can hardly wait to get to it, but I have vowed to take things in the proper order, so we'll start with my delightful stay at El Remanso on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. And I'll try to do a day or two of the two-week trek every day, so stay tuned! You can check the box in the right column if you want to be advised when a new blog entry goes up.

Costa Rica Sketch Journal ~ July 15, 2008

Hey, it's NOT the last day of my journal! This was July 15, and we didn't leave until the NEXT morning.

On THIS morning, after a 4:45 wakeup call from howlers then a visit by macaws, of which Dan got some darkish photos (hey, the sun was barely up, and it was cloudy!) Dan'l and I had one last pilgrimage to make ~ to the waterfall and grotto where you can stand beneath the falls for a wonderful drubbing. So I guess you'll have to put up with one more day of blog entries!

We trotted down the steep trail after stopping to greet a couple of the fine women who clean our rooms daily, sweeping out the debris we track in, cleaning out the ant moats (see the ant moat on yesterday's page) and making our beds. Then down past where workmen are building a new cabina, carrying heavy beams and roof panels down on their shoulders and wheeling bags of concrete down by hand so as not to create noisy construction to disturb the guests and wildlife in the surrounding rainforest. They'd been working since sunrise, and were taking a break when we arrived.

Here's the trail just before it lets out onto the beach ~ you can hear the surf rumbling, and the breeze comes freshly up the ravine at this point. It's only a short distance down the beach to where the waterfall stream comes out to the ocean, and shady this early in the morning.

We passed the coconut grove at the mouth where tides have washed in coconuts, which subsequently sprouted and grew, and headed upstream. Inside the ravine, it is cool and moist, with braided strangler figs climbing trees, heliconias sparking red in the dimness, and a morpho butterfly flip-flopping (blue~brown~blue~brown) ahead of us (we never DID get a picture of one ~ they are beastly difficult to photograph!).

The air quickened as we approached the falls, which is about 70' high. The water spills over black rocks, splits into two main strands, and drops into a sandy, knee-deep pool. It is daunting to consider stepping under this deluge, but it's worth the trauma. If you stand under one stream you get a great massage of smallish water drops. They drum mightily on your head and shoulders, and if your rump sticks out they pound there, too (that kinda hurts, so one's posture improves under this waterfall). Standing under the other strand, you get a real thumping by larger drops.

I could only stand under the strong side for a few moments, but Dan loved that heavy drubbing best. We took advantage of the free massage for a long time, although there was always the possibility that a rapelling group might come over the edge and catch us in the altogether.

Finally, pounded to a pulp, I dried off with our microfiber towel (this is a terrific improvement over any other travel towel, by the way: beach towel size, very efficient, and folds to 5x9x1" to carry back to one's cabina to dry out) and went looking for poison dart frogs ~ but I didn't spot any. I found one here in the past, a lovely blue and red one, but I didn't luck out this time.

At length, we ended up back on the beach, and while I winnowed through the beach wrack for treasures (see the lovely palm bark I found!) Daniel pulled out a couple of trash bags he'd gotten from the restaurant kitchen and commenced to pick up plastic bottles, flip-flops, and other things the storm had washed up on the beach. As I mentioned before, this trash was an anomaly ~ it's usually pristine on this beach, and even today there was far less trash than there had been the day before.

I was intent on one last sketch, so I stood as far from the jungle's edge as I could and drew the scene up the ravine we had just visited. Occasionally the incoming tide swirled around my knees, and, intent upon my drawing, it was only chance that I refocussed and rescued my shoes a moment before they sailed out on a wave.

The photo is taken from closer to the jungle's edge, after the tide had come in, but you can SORT of see what I was sketching. When drawing knee-deep in ocean, in hot sun, with a pen, the drawing might not EXACTLY reflect reality. Also, I had to make the tallest tree shorter when I ran out of paper room..... Still, I'm delighted with my beach picture because it catches the feeling of that beach and bit of rainforest. And it's nice to have the photo as well, because if I ever want to color this scene, I have everything I need to prompt me.

Dan stayed down on the beach for the rest of the day, but I had one last mission. When I packed up for this trip, I had included watercolor pencil sets, pencil sharpeners, waterbrushes and workbooks for Adri, Eljer and Gerardo, and planned to do a workshop with them. Eljer, though, was working in Spain for the season, and we couldn't find a time Adri and Gerardo could both get together, so I ended up teaching Adri one afternoon and on this last afternoon, Gerardo. Both mini-workshops were very rewarding, and we were all pleased with the progress that was made. While Gerardo was working on his lesson, I colored in my journal. I think Gerardo can go far with his art if he practices.

The sun set as Gerardo was working, and after he left, Dan'l and I sat soaking up our last evening's worth of frogsong and cricketcreaks. A thunderstorm flashed lightning out over the ocean in a final lightshow for our vacation. We'd be leaving in the morning.