sOmeWhere OVER the RaInbOw

mmm... so far costa rica is delicious! last monday we hopped on a bus or three and made
our way over to Monteverde>home of some of the most amazing cloud forest ever. we have stayed here the whole week waiting out the holiday since the next place we want to go to is beachy and probably covered with at least 6 meeeeelion people on vacation right now.

thats ok this little place is awful pretty and we have a nice little hostel with a kitchen to use so we can spend a little money on long walks through the jungle and extreme sports. oh yeah we gotta add a couple new animals to our list like the family of Kinkajous we saw and humming birds and morpho butterflies... muy bonita.

did i say extreme sports? oh man did i ever! so sheesh here i go jumpin out of my comfort zone again petting a sting ray in belize, jumping down a freaky waterfall in a cave in guatemala, standing on hells hot lava in antigua, and noW----

ZIPLINING THROUGH AND OVER THE CLOUD FOREST!!!

red didnt think i had the balls er... ovaries to do the eXtReMo companies ziplines. they were definitely the most intense with 18 lines 4 of which were 1000 feet in the air going 4000 feet across this mountainous valley... wHoa it was soo cool! the closest thing to flying i have ever done and unless i go parachuting some day probably the closest i will get! we were so high up we could see the ocean and cows were just specks and there were rainbows that we were OVER! the rainbow was a complete circle from our view point! on some we went together and some alone and some were shorter and went straight through the canopy over and under mossy branches of old growth cloud forest beauteousness...

actually it was more relaxing than scary for me ... that is until we got to the Tarzan swing! the tarzan swing was hooked up to your harness from 2 or 3 floors up on a platform. thankfully you didnt have much time to think before they pushed you right off! then it was a several second free fall before flying out on the 90 foot long rope between trees like... welll like tarzan!

now red and i can add flying through the sky to our list along with swimmin with the fishies in three different oceans standing on mountains and volcanoes rivers and ponds.

wife=handcuffs and ketchup part 2

Nicaragua----was a really unique experience. its definitely a very dramatic place that i could see would be easy to fall in love with. there are so many volcanoes there, its hard not to be humbled by the presence of such majestic giants. then there are the sea like lakes and the undomesticated pacific coast.

the cities of Leon and Granada were neat in terms of the massive and artistic colonial architecture with these lakes and volcanoes looming in the distance. nice to see but they are like many places that i wish i could visit via someone who lives there because as a road weary traveler its sometimes hard to scratch the true surface of places like that. i could feel the energy of those places but i didnt know what rock to lift to find the beating heart. do you know what i mean? we kind of got stuck on the gringo trail there and were ready pretty quickly to escape the higher prices.

the towns were also a good place to learn more about the peasant revolutions that took place there. i could go on and on about how intense this trip has been for learning about each of these countries wars of the people versus murderous governments either indirectly or directly paid for by the united states. i think had an idea of it all. but really what a false honeyed idea. it makes me absolutely sick to know where americans tax money goes. and although i am a peace enthusiast to the grave i am more and more able to see the reason behind armed civilian resistance.

we also visited a nonprofit on the coast of Nica that was started by a great guy my age from... money he earned teaching English in Taiwan... ahhhh... i guess giving midterm exams to three yr. olds is making dreams come true everywhere! it was really wonderful what he has done though. he made like an eco hostel in a tiny fishing village that really sincerely blended tourism with community service. he has an afterschool club for kids to come and play sports or do art and also he sponsors kids to go to school as well as many other projects. it was great to see how the village had truly accepted him.

one of the things i really liked about Nicaragua was that they had such a unique contemporary culture, something that i had not sensed in my (brief to be sure)time in El Salvador and Honduras. Nicas are obsessed with poetry. that was a really cool and unexpected thing to find out! in all of the towns there are statues of poets and things named after them. i have still to get my hands on some but i am working on it. that obsession has trickled down into a hip hop and graffiti subculture as well. in so many of the chicken buses that we rode there was hip hop blasting in spanish and sometimes even rap videos on pulldown tvs.

i would definitely like to come back someday.

Now however we are in Costa rrrRica and super excited to check out the cloud forest this week and hopefully see some sloth action...er inaction. the direct translation of the spanish word for sloth (perezoso) is lazy. sweet. oh and to quell your curiousity.. the direct translation for handcuffs in spanish is wife. awesome.

KeTcHup

(the pictures are all from the after school kids club/ eco hostel in jiquillo)

first of all i would just like to point out some new nicknames that red has acquired from various central americans because of his beard---osama bin laden is still most often but believe it or not Bob Marley is a close runner up--what? i mean really, what?! trailing behind that are Fidel Castro and Santa Claus. hmmm.... that i can see.

as for me, red swears he heard someone call me Janet Jackson. i would be flattered if i believed him.

ok so quite a bit has passed without much from us. i think i already described our impression of El Salvador... as for Honduras our impression was rather mixed for reasons that some of you might know. i kind of think that in all three countries El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua our experiences were often tainted by being caught in the ´wrong´(thats too strong of a word) place at the wrong time. in all three countries we rarely stayed put for more than two days and many times just one.

i think that part of that was in comparison to guatemala that we just fell in love with and had such a wonderful time in. between the landscape, the intensity of the culture and the prices, guatemala is an all time favorite.

also we didnt make it to much of the national parques that make those three (el sal, hond, nica) countries amazing too, we arent really city people despite the absolute quaintness of some of these colonial towns.

The Copan Mayan Ruins in Honduras was something that really touched us though. while Tikal ruins are spectacular for the height of their structures, Copan matches that magnificence with their exceptionally artistic carvings of various warriors and kings
and their hieroglyphics everywhere. including an entire staircase leading up... two or three stories tall that was completely and intricately formed from carvings, telling stories of various leaders rising to power.

also there were underground temples too.. really amazing. in the museum they had a skeleton of what they thought was a mayan shaman from maybe 300 a.d. in a glass case. that was really wild to see, especially since all of his teeth had holes that had been drilled in them and then filled with gems like obsidian and jade!

We visited the caribbean coast again while we were in honduras which was crystal clear and lazy smooth (minus some unfortunate circumstances) and then hauled our bums over to Nicaragua.....

petroglyphs, blue parrots, and fresh water sharks

these are things that you can find nestled between two volcanoes amidst a giant lake in southern nicaragua. isla de ometepe was one of the places that i had been looking forward to seeing for months and months. the lake itself is huge like lake michigan and apparently it used to be connected to the ocean, then it was slowly closed off but the sharks evolved and now are the only of their kind in the world. unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) we didnt see any. what we did see was more trees and flowers and butterflies than we have seen since we left guatemala. and the blue parrots, which probably arent at all parrots, were really neat too. they make all kinds of funky calls.

they say that when the mayan city of teotihican (or something close) was overcome in mexico way back in the day that the mayan priests told them that they should walk until they find a lake between two volcanoes and this is what they found. the most obvious signs that people lived there so very long ago are the thousands of petroglyphs scattered across the island. we were able to see some on a walk from an organic coffee farm that we stayed at.

we thought we might stay and work at a farm there because starting next week is Semana Santa a hugungous catholic holiday and apparently everything is all kinds of busy because EVERYONE has the week off. but the farms werent what we thought they might be and so now we are on a lovely beach in the very south of nica wondering what the heck we might do.

red wants to pet a sloth so i think we will head to costa rica tomorrow.