Monkeying around

So, I know some of you must be thinking that I am just monkeying around laying on the beach here in Costa Rica instead of studying. You know, I suppose that is partially true. But the thing is, lately I've only gone traveling for school. Bocas del Toro, Panama, for instance... I had to go down there to be able to legally finish out the semester. :)

I've actually been trying to get around to posting some pictures from a field trip I had a few weeks ago. For my class on Remote Land Sensing we went hiking out some trail just to check out what kinds of land cover there was in that area so we could see how that land cover looks in a satellite image. I had a lot of fun taking tons of pictures. But they are mostly just more flower pictures, so I won't bother posting all of them up here.

These field trips are a really cool aspect of studying here. I was actually sitting on the beach today after we had gone there to visit a government-run program that is ecologically responsibly developing a peninsula on the northwest coast. The peninsula is actually right across the little bay where I went scuba diving back in July. The place is really amazing. Take a look at the beach. In the background you see part of the same peninsula sticking up out of the sea with some houses build on it.


Now don't get this government development project mixed up with "the projects" in the suburbs... this place was pretty much a country club with a 5-star Four Seasons hotel down on the end of the peninsula.

Check it out in google earth... just download this file and then double click it if you have Google Earth installed. If you don't have Google Earth then you better go download it. It is the coolest program ever, and I plan on posting some really cool kmls later. It'lll be great!

The whole project turned out to be really interesting. Development projects like this usually get a lot of flack from the Ticos because these rich projects can be very environmentally irresponsible. When Ticos look at a golf course they think it is incredibly wasteful because of the deforestation it causes as well as the water needed to keep the greens green. All this for a silly game. They think it is really weird.

But the reality of this development project is that it is being run super environmentally aware. Houses can't be taller than the trees and have to be earthy colors. They have a system for disposal of all their trash where 100% of it is being recycled in some way. Plastics and aluminum are separated out and given to a nearby town so they can sell the recyclable material and benifit from that money.

Another pecularity about this project is the fact that the don't sell the lots, but rather they sell the rights to build on the land. The peninsula is actually a reserve, 'belonging to the people', and so the amazingly beautiful beaches are open to the public 365 days a year. Because they don't want many cars on the peninsula they actually have a guarded free parking lot and free shuttle service to the beaches. They really want to make sure that the Costaricans get to enjoy the coolest places in Costa Rica even if it does get settled by filthy rich golfers.

The reason we went down there to take a look at their poject is because they are using a very impressive geographical information system to help in the development. Everything from land cover and topology all the way down to the sprinkler heads and the rocks at an archeological site are georeferenced and stored in the GIS. It was really cool to see it.

So there. I finally got a little better caught up on here. Now hopefully I will be able to keep up with this week which is going to be awesome... Jiwon and her sister actually decided to fly down here to spend a week with me and try to get to see some of this cool country. They actually get in at noon today and we are planning to take off to a beach somewhere. This means that soon I will have some really cool pictures to be posting on here. So stay tuned!

New website!

I'm back in San Jose now, trying to get back into the swing of things at school. Since I got back I've been able to download all my pictures from my camera and put up a website to display them all. I simply had too many great pictures to post here. :D

Check them out at http://samhiatt.googlepages.com

I still do need to make a better report of my super awesome vacation to Bocas del Toro, so check back soon for the official report of the trip.

Oh, don't forget to leave comments here! I want to know what you think of all my new pictures!

My required 72 hour vacation

More than a month has gone by since my last blog post. I appologize to all my blog's enthusiasts for the inconvenience. Actually, on second thought, perhaps you all should be thanking me for not posting in all that time. I was just looking over my last few posts and I noticed that since school started all my blogs got really dull.

I've been meaning to write something up to expound upon how my classes are going at the UCR but, although I suppose there is a lot I could say, I just never get excited enough to sit down and write about it. It's still on my "to do" list. So if for some reason you were looking forward to hearing me go on about all the nerdy classes I have, don't feel too disappointed 'cause I'll get to it some time. (Maybe after I get around to actually making a "to do" list... haha)

So it's been just about 90 days since I first got to Costa Rica, which means my travel visa is about to expire and so it's time for my required 72 hour vacation outside the country. Thanks to the wonderful efficiency of the bureaucracy down at the Costarican immigration office and some ill-considered changes in the immigration laws, the Study Abroad office at the UCR unofficially told us that it might just be easier to take a trip to Nicaragua or Panama. So... here I am...

Bocas del Torro is an archipelago (group of islands) Just south-east of the Costa Rica - Panama border. I really wish I had heard about this place sooner! Not only is it relatively close to San Jose, but it happens to be a great place for diving! I actually barely got here in time this morning to fit in a dive and I just got out of the water a couple of hours ago. It was so cool that I had to come write about it!

Like I said after my scuba trip in northern Costa Rica, on the Pacific side, I recommend scuba to everyone. I simply can not find the words to describe how amazing life is under the sea. There is so much life down there it is just amazing. I love just watching a certain spot on the ocean floor and noticing all the things that I had never known existed. And, especially here in the Caribbean, the colors are wonderful! My last dive was by a coral reef that was covered with all kinds of colorful coral which naturally provides a home for all the other cool animals there. The place company I dove with today has some really good underwater camera equipment and will photograph your dive and burn a picture CD for 20 bucks. My blog just may get some really cool pictures pretty soon!

So getting to this small island town was quite an adventure. My 7 hour bus ride from San Jose, across the border, and about 30 km into Panama ended up taking about 11 hours and only taking me to the border. About 2/3 of the way here the bus broke down and we had to wait for some mechanics to show up and fix the bus while it sat there in the middle of the road. Though at first I wasn't too excited about the delay, it ended up being a great opportunity to see a part of Costa Rica that I had been missing out on. I suppose it was a great place to break down 'cause it was right by the ocean. I ended up chatting with a guy who lives right off the road where we were stopped and he took me to a little restraunt a little way down the street ticked in the palm trees between the coast and the road. I took a bunch of pictures of the place and hope to get some posted here soon. I just loved having a taste of the relaxed Caribbean culture, and some tasty Caribbean stew.

The bus got fixed right as I was finished with my stew, and so the journey continued. We ended up making it to the border at about 7:30 pm, but the immigration offices had closed, so I ended up having to find a place to stay there. I wouldn't have wanted to spend any time in this sketchy border town, especially not with all my luggage unequivocally branding me a gringo tourist. I ended up finding a hotel room and crashing until the border opened back up at 7:00 am.

Once in Panama I hired a taxi to take me to the port where I could take a water taxi to the island. The next boat was to leave about an hour after I got there, so I got to eat breakfast in this small pueblo on the edge of a tropical lagoon. It was beautiful there!

While eating breakfast and watching the kids play out in the street I realized how much I am missing by living in the City. I feel kind of ripped off in a way that most of my time in Costa Rica is spent in the city at the school. For some reason I love seeing the small towns. They are old and run down, but they are beautiful in a way. San Jose is old and run down too, but it sure isn't the same! It is so nice to get a chance to skip town and start seeing Central America again!

Well, until next time... Expect to see some awesome pictures up here soon!

Field trip to Cartago

This past Saturday I got to visit rural parts of the neighboring province of Cartago. It was a unique opportunity to see Costa Rica through the eyes of a non-tourist. This time I got to see through the eyes of a geographer. I was on a field trip with my class in photogrammetry.

It’s a really cool class. Here’s the basic idea of it, as per Wikipedia’s definition:

Photogrammetry is a measurement technology in which the three-dimensional coordinates of points on an object are determined by measurements made in two or more photographic images taken from different positions (see stereoscopy).

So on Saturday our objective was to go to certain locations that we could identify in an aerial photo of Cartago and get their exact GPS locations to geo-reference the photo. Later we will put the photos together and use the principles of stereoscopy to generate a topographical map of the area. Cool, huh?

Some of the points we needed to geo-reference were way out in the sticks. To get to those we got to do some fun 4x4ing in a University bus. At some points the bus couldn’t go any further, so we had to get out and hike the rest of the way.

During one of such hikes we were passed up by some farmers hauling some stuff in their 2-horsepower carts. Maybe they were 3-horsepower carts, depending on the ratings of the two oxen that were hauling them. Unfortunately I didn’t have camera with me this time and I missed out on several potentially prize-winning photos. I did get this song stuck in my head, though…

I'm writing you to catch you up on places I've been.
You held this letter, probably got excited,
but there's nothing else inside it.
Didn't have a camera by my side this time.
Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes.
Maybe I will tell you all about it
when I'm in the mood to lose my way with words.

- John Mayer – 3x5

Coinage

Aaaah... the good old coin system here. Costa Rica uses the colon (with an accent on that last o) as currency and, as in many other countries in S. America, the currency is constantly dropping in value as compared to the US Dollar. This causes the necessity of frequently redesigning and releasing new coins into circulation, with evidence of inflation each time. A coin worth 20 colones gets sucessively smaller each time. The huge version of the 10 colones coin is about the size of those Liberty dollar coins and has got to be worth less than the 2 cents (USD) it is worth. But since it was made just fifteen years ago, I suppose they are reluctant to take them out of circulation. The result is a huge array of coins all worth the same ammount mixed with several versions of other coins of varying ammounts - all being used at the same time! Oh, and sometimes you end up getting back Dollars for change, too.

I'll try to get a picture of all of them up here some time soon.

Corruption

In regards to the huge debate in the US now considering illegal Mexican immigrants, I've always felt that an ideal solution to all the border control problems would be to remove the borders completely. I've figured that the border results in the US taking advantage of poverty in Mexico. Wouldn't the world be wonderful if there were no borders creating such disparities?

Lately I've been realizing, however, how unrealistic such a solution might be. Corruption in government - in all countries - naturally prevents any such Utopia. I've been considering how corruption in government perhaps creates a need for borders.

San Jose is well known for it's high crime rates. I've been told that Costa Rica has the same amount of police as they did fifty years ago. A solution to the crime in the city seems obvious.

When I asked a San Jose native the other day why he figured there was such crime in the city he explained that the cops here simply aren't paid enough. At least a large majority of them are corrupt. He said, "There are people that could be good cops, but they all have jobs elsewhere!" He elaborated, "So the people that end up being cops are the people that don't have anything else to do." Perhaps that is a bit cynical, but it definitely shows an interesting aspect of the politics down here.

On the bus to Nicaragua I had some further insight. About 3 km from the border the bus stopped and let off a bunch of people who ended up walking down some dirt trail away from the road. I asked the guy beside me where he though they were going and he said, "They're going to Nicaragua... they just have to hike a ways to get around border control." The bus had already been stopped and checked by border control, and so I asked how they had gotten by them! He replied simply, "Oh, they just paid the cops a bit so there wouldn't be any problems."

On the way back from Nicaragua I saw another funny incident. After I had gone through all the hoops at the border and gotten on the bus headed toward the city, I was surprised when the bus stopped at the same trail. All of a sudden about 20 or 30 Nicaraguans came out of a shack and boarded the bus. One of them ended up sitting by me, and I had a chance to talk to him a bit. I asked him how people are so easily able to cross the border illegally and he told me that they just needed to contact someone with the police to set everything up so that they don't have any troubles with the border control farther down the road - for a small fee, of course.

Now, I suppose it is easy to complain about the unfamiliar differences in government here (and I'm not saying that there is no corruption in my government - it's just different there), but it is difficult to see any solutions. I suppose that's the same way everyone around here feels. They do live well, for the most part, anyways.

So that's a bit of insight into how things are down here. It's still paradise, just with its fair share of the real world.

Puerto Viejo de Talamanca

So after sitting around the hostel trying to fight off some virus I picked up in Nicaragua, I decided I had to ship out to the Caribbean coast for one last trip before school started.
What a great decision! Puerto Viejo ended up being one of my favorite cities in Costa Rica. Even though it is mainly a tourist town, Puerto Viejo has maintained a very comfortable environment. It’s a wonderful Caribbean getaway!

I stayed at Lonely Planet’s #1 recommended budget hostel called Rocking J’s. I paid $5/night for a hammock to sleep in. The place was right on the beach which was one of the most amazing beaches I’ve seen in my life! Every picture I took of it turned out post-card perfect! The mosquitoes liked the place, too. I ended up looking like a red polka-dotted clown by the time I left. I’m glad none of them gave me dengue. I hear bad stuff about that.

My first day in Puerto Viejo I met some people out on the beach. They turned out to all be students at the University of Costa Rica! I ended up following them down Manzanillo, a little town surrounded by a wildlife reserve. After hiking about 15 or 20 minutes down a dirt trail paralleling the coast we found some of the coolest places ever! These completely natural beaches just blew my mind!

Hugging the shores of most of the coast are coral reefs that prevent swimming in most areas. I got lucky on my last day there because I was able to borrow a friend’s diving mask and swim around the reefs. The reefs weren’t living, so they weren’t full of color, but they made great homes for a lot of colorful fish. That was yet another experience that fed my desire to learn more about life under the sea. It is a whole new world down there!
(Does anyone else have a couple Disney songs going through their heads after that last paragraph?)

Well, all good things do come to an end and I had to come back to San Jose to start going to school. I’ve done two days so far and it’s looking like I’m going to get to take some pretty cool classes that will end up allowing me to finish my minors in GIS and in Computer Science by the end of the school year. This should make for an interesting semester!

Melati's pictures from San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

My new friend Melati from Holland took these pictures at the beach in Nicaragua. Luckily, she didn’t have a digital camera and had to use my camera… so I get all the pictures! Thanks, Melati! You’re a great artist!