I can't believe that I'm getting college credit for some of the things I've been doing here. This past weekend I had a field trip for my conservation biology class. It was great. We started the weekend on Friday, and stopped first at Braulio Carillo National Park. It is one of the biggest national parks in Costa Rica, and it is to the east of San Jose. We did a short two-hour hike through the forest, and saw some enormous spiders.

We then continued our trip to Cahuita, which is a small town on the Caribbean, with Cahuita National Park right next to it. It had a very relaxed feel to it, and it was quite a bit different from the Pacific side due to the Jamaican influence. The next morning (Saturday), we took a walk through the park and saw two kinds of monkeys (howlers and white faced), and several sloths. We followed the walk with a snorkeling trip. The coral on the Caribbean side is more diverse, with many more kinds of fish. I got to see a lion fish, which was cool, and I was extremely lucky to see a nurse shark! It was beautiful, about five feet long, very graceful, and calm. It had been resting on the bottom, and after I had watched it for a minute, it slowly glided away. I was very excited.
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That afternoon we traveled to Gandoca, which is about an hour further south on the coast. It has a turtle nesting beach (for leatherback turtles), and there is a community-run conservation program for the turtles. It consists of locas families volunteering their time to protect the turtles. Although we didn't see any turtles, it was very interesting to learn about their efforts, especially when I will be traveling to Tortuguero in two weeks to see the big, government-run turtle conservation program. The next morning we did an early boat tour of the mangroves near Gandoca. We got to see some cool birds and more sloths. After breakfast we had a seven hour trip ahead of us to get back to San Ramon, but it was a great weekend!