For Santa Rosa pictures, click here.

Hey world! I’m back, still alive and well. Ok, not entirely well, but that’s part of the story, so you’ll just have to keep on reading to find out what I mean by that.

So I’m writing this on the bus taking us to the Monteverde Cloud Forest research station. We just Santa Rosa National Park. What was it like? This is honestly difficult to put into words. Try this. Try to imagine the most incredible beach paradise you can. Take away the palm trees, add some amazing jungle scenery and cliffs extending down into the ocean. Now add breeding sea turtles that crawl up onto the shore at night and lay eggs in the sand, humpback whales just offshore, the most incredible weather you could believe, and perfect waves that are over a kilometer long. Oh yeah, and there are NO people. Whatsoever. On a beach that is probably 6 kilometers long (or longer, I want to GPS it when I get back), we saw probably 10 surfers total for the two days we were there and that was it.

This place was unreal. Absolutely unreal. I’m still trying to process it, but it really was a beach paradise.

Now onto what we actually did. As we approached Santa Rosa, we made a stop at our nature guide’s house. His name was Eladio and he runs Eladio’s Place. Imagine a slightly aging, incredibly kind, stoner/surfer and you’ve pretty much got him pictured. Eladio has started a business where he takes people out adventuring in nature and guides them to wherever they want. You can rent one of his houses, go surfing with him, or do what we did, which was go camping.

We dropped our big bags of luggage off at Eladio’s place and then put the bags we were taking to the beach in his truck, then got back on the bus where we drove to the entrance of Santa Rosa. Matt had told us not to bring rain gear or warm clothes because there was no way it would rain or be cold.

Mhm, suuuurreee Matt.

We got off the bus and it was raining. Some of us weren’t happy, but it ended up being a good thing. To get to Santa Rosa, you definitely need a car with 4-wheel drive and some nice suspension. The road is 12 km long and not well-maintained, so it’s full of big potholes, rocks and big mud pits. We didn’t have this (Eladio had our bags in his truck so he had no room), we just had our feet. And that’s what we used. We hiked the entire road through the jungle down to the beach. The rain was great, otherwise the hike would have been muggy, hot and horrible.

Arriving at the beach campsite was a shock. Eladio had set up tables and chairs for us outside of a kitchen area with a grill, jug of hibiscus juice, a large cooler, and two people who would apparently cook all our food. He had also set up tents for us to use. I had to try really hard to convince myself this was camping and I’m still not sure I’m fully there. It was luxurious. What was the first thing I did? Jump in the ocean, of course. We admired the beach while lunch was being prepared (it was around 14:00 at this point), then ate. I won’t describe all the meals, I will simply say that this was some of the most delicious food I have eaten or will ever eat while camping. Lunch was freshly grilled red snapper with rice, beans, plantains, and a fruit and vegetable salad. Of course there was also fresh hibiscus juice and hot coffee, because why not?

After lunch we explored the beach. Our only commitment for the rest of the day was to be back by sunset so we could learn cool things about sea turtles. So, we set out hiking and walked for a while along the beach to a lagoon a few kilometers down. We probably saw three people in total. We did some bird-watching at the lagoon, lay in the sand (this beach has the best sand. Hands down. Like absolutely no question whatsoever, you couldn’t find better sand anywhere you looked.) and then learned a little about hermit crabs because why not? By that time it was close to sunset so we headed back to camp. As we walked along the beach the sun set over the ocean and I swear angels cried as it happened it was so beautiful. We got back to camp and put our chairs on the beach, where Matt taught us about the life cycles of sea turtles and what we should expect to see on the beach.

After an incredible dinner under the stars (some of the best I’ve seen in a while), the moon rose and we began our hunt for sea turtles. We walked the opposite direction on the beach and found one almost right away! An Olive-Riddley turtle was crawling its way up the beach. These turtles are WAY bigger than I imagined. This was apparently the small species, and it looked around 3 feet long weighing probably 100 pounds. She didn’t lay any eggs and went back to the sea. We explored some tide pools that night as well and found rock crabs, which are beautifully colored and can run faster than hell.

After breakfast the next day, we went on a hike in the jungle behind us to learn about mangroves and the role mangrove swamps played in ecosystems across the world. This basically involved hiking through an insane mangrove swamp listening to Braden talk about cool plants and animals. We had lunch after and then unstructured time until dinner. Most of us decided that we should spend a lot of time in the ocean bodysurfing and generally playing around in the waves. Hannah and I had noticed that Eladio had a surfboard, so we decided to ask him if he had an extra that we could use for the day. He brought one later in the afternoon and we surfed for a few hours, taking turns on the board (we’re both beginners and he brought a shorter board than we were used to, but we both ended up riding a lot of waves so it worked out amazingly in the end).

But, wait, didn’t I say I got injured earlier? Ok yeah, so maybe surfing didn’t work out perfectly. After successfully riding a wave, I decided to fall backwards off the board. Unfortunately, I did this right about the same time a huge gust of wind blew onto the ocean (it could get really, really windy there). It caught the nose of the board and whipped it around to land directly on my head. Hard. Like I immediately got out of the water and gave the board to Hannah, then proceeded to sit down and make sure I didn’t pass out. Turns out it hit hard enough to break my skin and by the time Hannah returned I had blood dripping onto my eyebrow from the crown of my head. Great.

For all I know, I’m not concussed. We did a little first aid and it feels fine so I think I’ll make it out alive. Who knows though? This is only the beginning of week 2 here and I’m already racking up scars.

Before dinner the entire FSP walked back onto the beach for a hermit crab lecture, where we watched thousands of hermit crabs socializing. Mark taught us a ton; it just so happens that he does the majority of his research on crabs so he kind of knows a bunch about these animals. After dinner we went turtle hunting again (aided this time by a bottle of Flor de Caña) and passed the trails of 3 large ones. Unfortunately we never saw them, but we did see the nest that one dug and likely laid eggs in. As everyone returned to camp, I stayed out on the beach for another half hour trying to take in the entire scene so I would never forget it. The sand has minuscule pieces of mica in it that reflect the moonlight, so wherever you look the ground was sparkling with what looked like millions of tiny sapphires.

We woke in the morning and packed our stuff for Eladio to drive up the road. Immediately after a 7 am breakfast we started hiking back up the 12 km trail to get to the bus. Suffice to say it was much hotter on the way up, but somehow we made it back faster than we had made it down (potentially because it was way less slippery). We got on the bus and drove to Monteverde. More on Monteverde on the next page.