Marique is our driver. On the road exactly at 7 am

There are 200 volcanos in Costa Rica-4 are active now.. One near San Jose is erupting about every 2 months.

Casado …main food for lunches & dinners is rice and beans, meat and salad… leftovers for breakfast with eggs maybe and onions. Patacones are made with plantain. Coffee main crop in past. The best quality is exported. Micro chips are the biggest exporter…. Not bananas, not pepper or coffee.

Electricity is produced 70% from hydro, 20% geothermal from volcano, and rest from wind turbines and solar.

Carara national park best for birding. Good for animals too … wet and dry forest animals from both sides of the mountain. Only one male jaguar per 1-4000 hectares each. They do not overlap each other’s territory.

Stopped for breaky then off to see the crocodiles. American crocs will grow up to 6 metres in length. Sometimes people die when swimmers and surfers go to where they have been warned not to go. We stopped to see the huge crocs in the river from the bridge over the River Tarcoles.

Date palms used for production of palm oil were planted to replace the best kind of bananas that got infected with a disease back in 1940’s. Bananas are basically clones so once one has the disease it will affect them all. The palm trees themselves have only a 14 year lifespan.

After arriving at this lovely little hotel…. (actually the same one we had stayed at 4 years ago), we all travelled by local bus to a public beach near Manuel Antonio Park. The roads are incredible going up and over the hills… so steep and narrow and windy although I never felt that we could fall off a cliff like some other places I’ve been. Anyway, rented lounge chairs for $5 US each…. Under a canopy. Thank God. The heat was so, so very hot, a person could get third degree burns from walking on the sand so you run like hell from one shaded spot to another. The beach was gorgeous. Jax loved playing in the surf… actually trying out boogie boarding.

Later we walked to a restaurant for dinner but along the way a man was urinating on the sidewalk…. which I think shocked Jax cuz apparently kept bringing it up to others in the group. It’s an education but I’ll bet that if you went downtown Victoria, you’d see the same thing happening.