Other Locals

Any readers out there, at least Americans, remember Marlin Perkins' Wild Kingdom television show ages ago? Perkins was director of the St. Louis Zoo way back when and had this show about amazing animals around the world. You sort of walk into that when you get out of town in Costa Rica.

While boating on the estuary we came across a group of five iguanas along the shore. I had never seen more than one at a time. Do they have packs or family groups? What with movement of the boat and the underbrush this was the best shot I could get.

The second one was technically difficult with the back lighting. If you look carefully, though, you can see at least three monkeys, all napping in the afternoon heat. (Mad dogs and American tourists go out in the midday sun.) Easy to see the one main face but just to the right of the mouth there is an ear, the head facing left and face concealed. There is a baby all stretched out vertically on the lower right whose fur is a lighter brown.

The bottom two photos are of an identical boat to ours on the estuary and the entrance to the boatmen's cooperative.

I've been really bad about getting back to my colleagues' blogs. It's a week from hell at work to punish me for going away and I have to get pictures of Chef Jujo edited. He's the most interesting person we met down there and I promised him I'd do it.                                

Temporarily Tamarindo: Adventure!

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What a day. I took something over 1,100 snaps. Three-quarters are junk but there are some gems in there. We took a boat ride up the Palo Seco estuary, enjoying the mangrove swamp environment and looking for wildlife. We went ashore at one point, searching for howler monkeys. viz., the chap above.

There is a big regional festival this weekend in the town of Santa Cruz, an indeterminate distance east of here over some muy malo roads. This is cattle country, Central American division, and there were close to 700 cowboys and girls in the horse parade. The horse traffic jam was as bad as going into New York through the Lincoln Tunnel on Monday morning. even if there was no toll. This rider took pity on his horse and offered to share his cerveza with it.

Returning after dark, there was a serious traffic accident on the dirt road back to Tamarindo. In the US the police would have moved it to the side and let traffic pass slowly. Here, la policia completely blocked the road. In the best of my weak Spanish I asked an officer how long the delay might be. Una hora, mas o menos. I got that. I asked if hay una otra ruta a Tamarindo. The policeman consulted with a colleague. Es muy complicado, he told me. Check.

Then a taxi driver carrying some Americans back to Tamarindo offered to let me follow him through the back roads around the blockage. Well, that would be great, but, um, you aren't taking us to the banditos headquarters, are you? No, he was just being helpful. We have a GPS with a Costa Rica map and, at one point, we were in a completely black, uncharted zone. But here we are, back at the condo, after one of the best meals we've had in a long time at Carolina's. More about that tomorrow, I hope.

It's 1 AM as I finish this. Downtown St. Louis 365 will go up when I regain consciousness.

Demon Monkeys

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A last photo from the Museum of Natural History in New York. These two are not pets for the kiddies. Just look at those choppers! They are the stuff of bad dreams but oh so small, no more than a foot or 30 centimeters.

Time to get back to images of Missouri if I can find something from the archives.