Ok, so this blog site is being done by two people, just so you don't get confused. Arella typed the last few posts and I am Ngaire and I will be sure to sign all my posts.
I was quite excited for this trip before I came on it, given that this is the first country I have visited that my Dad has not been to, but also since it is another opportunity for me to see a Latin American country and practice my Spanish skills with a whole new dialect.
We have been very busy over the last week (thus there have not been any blogs). We went to Ometepe island where we went to a beach and went to a thermal pool that has formed at the bottom of a volcano. We saw lots of colorful birds including blue magpies.
After a night on the island we spent the next night on a ferry. We had a 12 hour ride on the deck of the boat. We had been told we would be sleeping in hammocks, but instead we had beach chairs tht we were not allowed to recline. The deck of the boat filled with water and we had to move all of our luggage so it didn't get soaked. There was also a ton of wind with mist in it and everyone bundled up in their rain ponchos and tried to get through the night. We all made it, but most of us got very little sleep.
When we arived at San Carlos we ate breakfast and then we headed out to start working. Breakfast was very good and was made up of eggs, beans and delicious pineapple. We drove out to one of the feeding centers about an hour away. The center was basically a barn with cement floors a few cribs and some portable dividing walls. We painted the walls bright colors and put numbers, letters and pictures such as a picture of tweety bird on the walls to make them more kid friendly. We also raked the back yard in order to prepare it for the ovens that the other group coming after us is going to build. The center was definitely not a place I would want to take care of children, especially not 1-3 year olds (which is the age group of this center). We ended up helping 3 different centers during the three days we have been here. None of them seemed quite safe for children in my opinion, but they are certainly better than nothing and are better now thanks to our cleaning. The last center we went to had rusty nails and broken glass all over the yard. Unfortunately it will be necessary for the members of the community to learn to not break their beer bottles around the center before the cleaning we did will really make any type of long term change.
On Friday we went on a boat ride down river to the rain forest. The boat was mostly filled with people who live in the small villages along the river. One lady had her chicken casually sitting next to her feet with no cage or anything. We got off the boat at el castillo after about 3 hours on the boat. This was a fort built by the Spanish in the late 1600's to protect against pirates and other countries such as the British. The fort was built in an idea location along the river for stopping incommers up the river.
We then kept going for another half an hour on a smaller boat to our very nice hotel. The hotel was right on the water and all the rooms were all on ground level and facing the water. There were lots of beautiful flowers of different colors and fruit trees which were used to freshly squeeze our juices for our meals. There was also a large gazebo with hammocks to sit in, which all of us took advantage of at some point.
On Saturday we started our morning with a hike through the forest, where we saw two types of poisonous frogs (one red and blue, and the other kind was green with black spots), monkeys, lizards, several types of lizards and colorful birds as well as butterflies. We also tasted a plant used for anesthesia which we just touched to our tongues to make them go numb for a few minutes. We headed back to the hotel to rest and read in the hammocks before lunch, which was fresh fish and rice with fish soup.
After lunch we went swimming in the river which was quite cold, but very refreshing. For dinner we had one of my favorite meals: shrimp! It was freshwater shrimp and they were huge. a lot of the girls were not fond of shrimp, so I got to eat a ton of my favorite food. We then had our first desert of the trip, which was called yucca. It was a fried yucca plant with cheese in a sweet liquid of some sort.
After dark I went with one other girl to go searching for alligators with a guide. We saw two right away in the water near the hotel. They got away before we could catch them. We then saw another one that also got away before we left the area right around the hotel. We were in a motor boat and shining a flashlight along the shore looking for the little red eyes right above the water which is the sign of an alligator. Eventually we were able to sneak up on an alligator and the guide reached into the water and grabbed it. It was about a four year old female. Her skin was scaly, but smooth to touch. The guide showed us how to safely hold the alligator by her neck and we could then take a picture with her.
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