15th December 2013
La Selva is a research station in the highlands north of San Jose. I was expecting “research station” to be a pseudonym for “jungle lodge” but I was wrong – this is definitely a research station and facilities are more rustic than most jungle lodges we’ve been to. No drinks available in the evening for a start! Of course, this also makes being without luggage more frustrating still. Especially in the humid neotropical rainforest.
For those who’ve never been. Your clothes stick to you within ten minutes, quicker if you’re walking. And if you walk much faster than an ambling pace you’ll soon be damp from top to toes and exhausted as well. Somehow the 100% humidity saps energy very effectively. So of course you might want to wash your clothes as well as yourself after a trek in the jungle. Except that wet clothes never dry here, ever.
All that said, we’ve already had some lovely wildlife sightings. Collared peccaries, a bit like small boars, are common in the undergrowth and we’ve had good views of mantled howler monkeys and spider monkeys overhead. Walking at night we found a tree porcupine (in a tree) and this apparently giant worm crossed our path. In fact, it’s a caecilian, a rare legless amphibian and probably the best sighting of the day.
There were also about a hundred bird species, but with the book in our luggage they all rather passed us by!
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