This is how we do it

Costa Rica Part III

• Driving to a little town called Guaitil where the people there make beautiful art out of the clay found in the nearby mountains. It is a simple yet difficult task where the ingredients come solely from the earth and the tools to shape them are completely random: gears from a car for a pottery wheel, a corn cob and a tooth brush to mold the clay, and pencils to etch markings, etc. They create amazing pieces of pottery that they fire at extraordinarily high temperatures and color using natural paints made from zinc, manganese, quartz, various oxides, etc. The owner (and my new friend) Willy was an expert with a sweet smile that got me!

• Waiting to see the Leatherback sea turtles come to Playa Grande to lay their eggs. You can go to a Conservation station and wait for them to radio down from the beach when they see the turtles come out. We wanted to see the turtles because they are truly amazing animals. The leatherbacks are the largest of all sea turtles, weighing up to 2000 pounds. They only come to shore during a period of a few months of the year and will only come out of the water at night in three hour windows before and after high tide. They bury their eggs in the sand and lay approximately 80 at a time (the survival rate is not good). When a baby turtle is born, they will scurry down the beach to the sea where they will remain for 20 years or so and then come back to the very same beach to lay their eggs. Don't ask me how they know which beach is their own; that is one thing that makes them so fascinating. We were there from midnight to 4am, laying on hard picnic tables and getting eaten by mosquitoes. Sorry, no picutures- they never showed up! It is pretty sad, the number of turtles have decreased by 97% in the last 20 years and if the trend is not reversed, they will be extinct within another 10. There used to be 50-90 turtles each night during this season and now there is maybe 5 if that. There is a lot of coastal development and the turtles don't like the lights. The night we were there it was thunder and lightning and they think the lightning scared them away. Had we gone the night before, we would have seen 5. We will definitely go back and try again, I think it would be an amazing sight to see.
  
• Lots of wild life everywhere, even on our back porch! (Those are green butterflies in that flour that totally look like leaves. This lizard was a friend of ours, he would run up the screen and go hide behind the speaker that hung above the door. He was there every day groovin to our tunes! Oh, and the gigantic dinosaur grasshopper was so big he almost didn't fit on that knob that is bigger than a regular doorknob!!)

• Tour of an active volcano. Mira Valles is a volcano that erupted a long time ago and caved in on itself. It is still active and since the rock and lava covered the opening, there are now a bunch of pressure outlets where the steam escapes along the sides of the volcano, which are called fumaroles. In one of the mini-craters you can go and walk around and see all the different boiling mineral pools, mud pots, and steam vents coming out. It is truly amazing! The water there reaches 300 degrees in some parts. Our guide kept having us touch it and laughing when we said "ouch" as we pulled our hands out. We then went down and did a little spa treatment, bathing in mud, sitting in a natural sauna, and then washing off in three different mineral pools. Seriously, at a spa, it would have been a $200 treatment- at least! So fun!

• Getting to know the Contreras family. Allen and Maritza have three kids, Watson (19) went on the volcano tour with us and had his first experience on the zip lines. Joseline (15) helped Maritza cook us a yummy meal our last night and made tres leches desert just for Ronnie (one of his favs). And then Anna (10) was very quiet and sweet, you could tell she liked being around us and her family, but she would never say it!
  

• And my favorite part about the whole thing was I got to spend 10 straight days with my husband and not share him with anyone! It was so nice relaxing by the pool, dining out, chatting for hours, and just being together without any other worries. Thank you to mom and dad for watching our kids, it made it so much easier knowing they were happy and safe.