(no subject)
Got into Boston without too much trouble. Scored the upgrade, which included dinner. Surprisingly, it was more food than the usual large salad. Unsurprisingly, the chicken was so dense it could only be detected indirectly, from the X-rays given off by the surrounding disk of collapsing matter.
Yesterday morning, I was 9 degrees above the equator. Tonight, I'm at 42 degrees.
---
Costa Rica.
Got to San Jose sans one piece of luggage that finally caught up to me around 36 hours later in another city. Biz contact #1 never showed, though he might have been looking for me during the half-hour I was filling out lost-luggage forms. I got to a hotel and called biz contact #2, which is who I really wanted to see in the first place. Contact #2 is looking very good. A gringo in CR, married to a local, wanting biz without too many legal ramifications. Lots of contacts, good marketing ideas, and the guy is hungry for a deal. I'm digging this guy. Slightly less shady than contact #1 was looking.
[Short aside -- I was on this trip with a co-worker. Due to the public nature of LJ and my own evolving privacy considerations concerning bringing others' personal lives, names, and descriptions into this forum (such as Client #1 or Contact #2), I'm not going to go into detail. I only mention it at all as the Quepos events were mostly planned by the coworker who has a knack for packing interesting adventures into a limited time.]
Quepos -- a tiny town on the Pacific coast, surrounded by rainforest. Three hours by car from San Jose, or 20 minutes by plane. The plane...was tiny. A Cessna two-oh-somethingoranother with five seats. I got flashbacks to flight lessons a few years ago, and not necessarily pleasant ones. But, overall, the flight was beautiful; flying over coffee fields and mountains and waterfalls and rainforest.
The next two days in Quepos sound exotic and action-packed, but Costa Rica is really one of the few places in the world that all of this can really be done. The first morning was a horseback riding tour of four or five people. We skirted farms, then rode into an eco-protected rainforest. A blue and green parrot followed us for most of the trip and sat on a branch above us as we swam in a pool underneath a waterfall. It was a wild parrot, but befriended by a local farmer so it had an intense curiosity about people. That afternoon, we took a jet-ski tour of the coastline, skiing in between rocky islands with crashing waves, and out to a couple miles to get a panoramic view. We snorkeled in Pacific water that was in the mid-80s -- not a Pacific with which I was familiar :)
That night we checked into our hotel and went to dinner in time to watch the local troop of squirrel monkeys bed down for the night in the hotel trees.
The next morning we went on a half-day fishing charter. I caught my first roosterfish -- a fish common from Baja to Peru, but not found anywhere else in the world. It was 30 pounds and fought like a bastard. I was loving it :) Mr. Rooster (well, probably a Ms. being that large) went happily back into the Pacific. That afternoon, we went white-water rafting in the Naranjo River through class III and IV rapids.
Back to San Jose the next day (yesterday), some shopping, then home.
I'm leaving out a lot, of course -- rainclouds trying to climb over volcanoes, fresh pineapple, wild banana trees, wilder taxi rides, Cervesa Imperial, a nice spicy local salsa, poisonous tree frogs, lots of rain, adventures with my rusty spanish, large iguanas, guava-fruit fallen all over the ground, absolutely amazing varieties of birds, and ferocious mosquitoes and fire-ants.
Pics will show up as they're scanned and downloaded.
Yesterday morning, I was 9 degrees above the equator. Tonight, I'm at 42 degrees.
---
Costa Rica.
Got to San Jose sans one piece of luggage that finally caught up to me around 36 hours later in another city. Biz contact #1 never showed, though he might have been looking for me during the half-hour I was filling out lost-luggage forms. I got to a hotel and called biz contact #2, which is who I really wanted to see in the first place. Contact #2 is looking very good. A gringo in CR, married to a local, wanting biz without too many legal ramifications. Lots of contacts, good marketing ideas, and the guy is hungry for a deal. I'm digging this guy. Slightly less shady than contact #1 was looking.
[Short aside -- I was on this trip with a co-worker. Due to the public nature of LJ and my own evolving privacy considerations concerning bringing others' personal lives, names, and descriptions into this forum (such as Client #1 or Contact #2), I'm not going to go into detail. I only mention it at all as the Quepos events were mostly planned by the coworker who has a knack for packing interesting adventures into a limited time.]
Quepos -- a tiny town on the Pacific coast, surrounded by rainforest. Three hours by car from San Jose, or 20 minutes by plane. The plane...was tiny. A Cessna two-oh-somethingoranother with five seats. I got flashbacks to flight lessons a few years ago, and not necessarily pleasant ones. But, overall, the flight was beautiful; flying over coffee fields and mountains and waterfalls and rainforest.
The next two days in Quepos sound exotic and action-packed, but Costa Rica is really one of the few places in the world that all of this can really be done. The first morning was a horseback riding tour of four or five people. We skirted farms, then rode into an eco-protected rainforest. A blue and green parrot followed us for most of the trip and sat on a branch above us as we swam in a pool underneath a waterfall. It was a wild parrot, but befriended by a local farmer so it had an intense curiosity about people. That afternoon, we took a jet-ski tour of the coastline, skiing in between rocky islands with crashing waves, and out to a couple miles to get a panoramic view. We snorkeled in Pacific water that was in the mid-80s -- not a Pacific with which I was familiar :)
That night we checked into our hotel and went to dinner in time to watch the local troop of squirrel monkeys bed down for the night in the hotel trees.
The next morning we went on a half-day fishing charter. I caught my first roosterfish -- a fish common from Baja to Peru, but not found anywhere else in the world. It was 30 pounds and fought like a bastard. I was loving it :) Mr. Rooster (well, probably a Ms. being that large) went happily back into the Pacific. That afternoon, we went white-water rafting in the Naranjo River through class III and IV rapids.
Back to San Jose the next day (yesterday), some shopping, then home.
I'm leaving out a lot, of course -- rainclouds trying to climb over volcanoes, fresh pineapple, wild banana trees, wilder taxi rides, Cervesa Imperial, a nice spicy local salsa, poisonous tree frogs, lots of rain, adventures with my rusty spanish, large iguanas, guava-fruit fallen all over the ground, absolutely amazing varieties of birds, and ferocious mosquitoes and fire-ants.
Pics will show up as they're scanned and downloaded.