Oh these guest commentators, you can never control what they write or forget to mention and then the next edition has to be full of retractions and corrections.
For instance name dropping, there was definitely also someone in the group mentioning that he has been to Nepal.
And being the teacher’s favourite doesn’t make you their pet or even a nerd (my mother had me tested, although that doesn’t mean a lot as she is also bit crazy on birding), it only means you are always early, are the most attentive, ask the most intelligent questions and basically know it all. What kind of teacher wouldn’t love that?
And also someone has to correct the teacher once in a while and which teacher wouldn’t appreciate to be corrected?
Somehow I now start to see her point.
The morning was actually as close to a beach vacation as we have come so far.
If you haven’t been to the Pacific Ocean, it is very similar to the North Sea but without dikes, less grey and more blue (actually all existing shades of blue), less Watt and more palm tree beaches, generally bigger, and 28°C in February. But no dikes, so I call it a tie.
Now let’s move on to wildlife Costa Rica has to offer beyond the avian one. To summarize: It is not welcoming.
Yesterday you saw the two guys in the river and although I cannot read the mind of reptiles I think their thoughts were all around how crunchy and juicy at the same time Chris would taste.
The warning signs are very explicit and simultaneously confusing. Do they mean: ” Do not swim, because if you do you feed the animals and that is not allowed”? So you would basically violate two rules at the same time and one would be unnecessary.
I remember these spiders from 1988 when I rented a horse in Cahuita (Chris laughed her head off, but you can rent a horse). It just didn’t want to get started and only after I followed the owner’s instructions to use violence and kick it, it slowly moved. But once it got going, it knew the path and as it was early morning there were a lot of spider webs blocking it. In each spider web there was a huge spider and the horse did not suffer from arachnophobia at all. So it just moved on and I got caught in one Spiderman-strong spider web after the other with the spiders crawling all over my body. I think the horse had a contract with the spiders and got its revenge for me kicking it.
And snakes… This one is cute and non-venomous, but two meters long.
A rodent of unusual size.
And feral jungle pigs, much smaller than the Zehlendorf/Kleinmachnow ones, but smell the same.
The famous leafcutter ants are everywhere. The ants transport bits of leaves along cleared paths to their colony to make a specific kind of fungus grow on the leaves. The fungus is then fed to the larvae, the adult ants live on the leaf sap. This whole symbiotic dualism is highly finetuned, the ants carry a bacteria with serves as an antibiotic and keeps the fungus mold and pest free.
And then there is the story of coconut proliferation. As coconut trees grow at the beach there is a considerable amount of coconuts that fall into the ocean. And then they go on a voyage and it obviously would not be a wise idea to grow roots then. Only when they lay still for several months and the coconut water inside doesn’t swoosh around anymore, the coconut understands this as a signal that it might be advantageous to start sprouting and there you go.
P. S. And speaking of wild boars, Kleinmachnow is world famous, everyone seems to have heard of the lion on the loose that turned out to be a Wildschwein — our Costa Rican guide, the Swiss couple.
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