Fascinating

I've rarely had trouble amusing myself by just walking around and looking outside, but, I have to say, I have NEVER been so fascinated by nature as I was this weekend in Monteverde.  

As you might guess by the name, Monteverde is a town high up on a mountain that is covered--and I mean as far as the eye can see, in green.  It rains a lot (even more so than in the rest of the country), and the highest parts are located in a cloud forest, meaning that on the curving bump of a road that goes to and from the town, clouds hang both below and beside you.  

So the drive marked part one of my fascination--looking out, green valleys below,  green mountains behind, the blue crest of the ocean just further back (but so distant and overpowered that it, too, appeared green), and clouds like semi-transparent dustings of Cool Whip moving sporadically in between.  But this was only the beginning..

Saturday morning we went ziplining with Selvatura tours, which is one of the most renowned ziplining companies in Costa Rica.  There were 13 platforms total (so 13 ziplines), the last one being, at 1 km long, the country's longest.  I don't even know how to describe the feeling of speeding above all the green, sometimes for almost a whole minute at a time.  It was incredible.  All I could think when I was up there was "How the hell did this happen??"  It's such an unnatural thing to be up that high...but because it puts you in a position where you're so wholly surrounded by an expanse of nature--the trees, the clouds, the birds, the mountains, it has the ability to make you feel so natural.  So that was part two, and it was pretty dang fascinating...but I might have been even more fascinated by what came next...

After the ziplining, we went for a hike along the trails and the swinging bridges then ended the day with a butterfly garden tour.  Now, I've always thought that butterflies were pretty, but I never knew there was so much to learn about them.  Like did you know that they can get drunk off of fermented fruits?  And not just that it's possible, but that they take full advantage of the possibility in captivity because they are smart enough to know that no predators are there to get them?  And have you ever looked at a butterfly's cocoon?  At this garden, they hang the cocoons together in an outdoor cabinet-type thing so that they can monitor them as the butterflies prepare to emerge.  From metallic gold, to rusty brown, to emerald blue, the cocoons in the cabinet  looked like they belonged in a box of jewels.  We saw the butterflies  all the way from their earliest stage, half-stripped of their cocoons and still incapable of flight, to their final stage, when they fly to the garden's cooler part, aware that it's their time to die.  And all of this was enlightening, maybe even borderline fascinating, but what really fascinated me was this one species: the owl butterfly.  

From one angle, the butterfly's wings, a speckling of browns and whites and forest greens, disguise themselves as an owl's head, complete with feathers, a beak and eyes.  THEN, if you flip the butterfly over, the wings disguise themselves as a snake that looks like it's slithering away, eyes looking at you, mouth open.  I just don't understand.  I've learned about adaptations, survival of the fittest, all the stuff like that...but, still, this absolutely blew my mind.  How does biology just up and realize the necessity of designing a wing like that?  It was a design so intricate it would be difficult for an artist to paint, but biology (or something..) takes care of the complications in a snap.  Ahh.  I want so badly to have some explanation, but all I have is this sense of fascination, so I guess I'll learn to be content with that.  That was part three, and already I'm overly satisfied with what came of my weekend in this town of green and clouds...but part four has to have been my favorite of all..

Sunday morning, we decided to scope out the only free attraction that the hostel staff had advertised to us during our little Monteverde orientation session: what was supposed to be a 20-minute hike to an old fig tree.  The directions they had drawn out on our map in a nice, elementary fashion basically consisted of "a little up, a little down, a turn to find 3 roads to the right, and a trip down the farthest one," marked loosely with a dotted squiggle.  We actually forgot to bring the map with us, so even these didn't help, and we ended up sweaty and out of breath (the high altitude was definitely noticeable) climbing dirt roads that only kept curving in an upward fashion.  We must have turned around 10 times.  Periodically, we would run into a local on the road, or flag down a taxi, or turn into a hotel lodge--we even bothered a guy on his porch as his underwear-clad girlfriend peered out from the door behind, and ask if someone knew of this old tree that was apparently good for climbing.  We got a couple of looks like we were crazy, a couple of mumbled Spanish directions, and one map even drawn for us in the dirt, but I swear we thought we were never going to find the stupid thing.  Somewhere along the way, we decided that it must have been a joke amongst the hostel staff to tell their poor travelers of the free attraction just to see how far they would go, and how exhausted they would get, on their quest for this made-up tree.  Our minds drifted between that and an image of some forest oasis that we were half-sure we were about to uncover, where the world's sweetest figs and a wide-open trunk with a magical kingdom must surely await tucked inside. (It was mostly this idea that kept us going.)   

We finally found a well-informed local man and his son headed in the tree's direction who were nice enough to show us to, and walk us down, the tiny little path (which was actually about 20 minutes from our hostel, but definitely NOT findable by our map).  The tree, surprisingly, did not contain a magical kingdom, or even sweet figs for that matter, but our exhaustion was quickly erased upon our arrival by just how incredible it was despite the lack of magic.  It's going to be hard to describe..  The sides were like woven lattice, making a tubular ladder that you could just climb inside.  Imagine a McDonald's playplace, but at least 10 times taller than the biggest slide, and 100% natural.  We climbed all the way to the top, simply crawling along the hollowed out, window-filled passageway of the tree's insides.  It was like caving, but above ground, and with views of the forest out every side.  On a list of the top 3 coolest things I've ever seen, this has got to be 1 or 2. (I have no idea what else goes on there...maybe that butterfly..) 

So this weekend was fascinating, overall...and a nice reminder of what can be learned just by looking outside.  It's moments like that, halfway up the trunk of an old fig tree, when I'm reminded that no worry, no doubt produced by my mind,  could withstand the comfort offered by the realization that, somehow, I get to be a part of the wondrous intricacy of nature that's all around.  And while this seems so readily apparent in the world's more untouched places, I sometimes forget that it can also be apparent, if only I look with a little more effort, in my everyday environment.  So, I'm going to try to be aware of the wonder that's around, and to keep that extra-looking effort in mind...because things (whether big or little, man-made or natural, inside or outside..) are so much more interesting, more satisfying, if you can find a way to hone in on that slight but ever-present bubble of thought that begs you to be fascinated by them.

And that's my schpeel about fascination...now I'm trying to see what else I wanted to remember..

Oh! At our hostel, I got to sleep on a lofted bed above the bathroom that was only reachable by a bamboo ladder.  It was a very tree/climbing-themed couple of days.  AND we ended up staying next door to this guy from Canada who is about to drive to Pennsylvania with Paula, a girl who just flew home from our program on Saturday, and his 3 friends.  They are working at a camp together in a few weeks, but he has never actually met Paula.  It was crazy though because we rattled off the full names of the other Canadians who had been here to see if, by chance, they knew each other since they were both from Ottawa.  Then we said, oh and there's Paula who was from Toronto and he was like "What? Yes! I know Paula!", but he doesn't actually know her, she's just like this enigma of Paula that exists in his mind.  Maybe you had to be there..

I'm getting so sad to have to say bye to the kids, and not only my kindergarteners but the older ones too.  There are definitely things about home that I miss, but it's an awful feeling to have to leave knowing that there's a good chance I'll never see these kids again or get to know where they end up, what will happen.  I'm borrowing someone's camera Friday so I'm going to take lots more pictures.  And I'm sure there will be plenty to blog about in the next few days, but right now I'm exhausted.  Soo, goodnight! Buenas noches! Maybe tomorrow I'll steal someone's picture of the fig tree off Facebook and put it on here..

:)