31st March

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I think at least one member of Monty Python was once a frustrated primary school teacher. ´What... is your name. What... is your favourite colour'. Small child continues to prefer nose-picking to intellectual endeavour. 'What... is the capital of Assyria?' Child fired into abyss.

There seems to be a serious pencil and biro currency in the school - they are the prizes that Oliver (the english teacher who I spend most of my time assisting) and I hand out to the younger years and always brings rapt excitement. Best keep my fountain pen hidden. I'm starting to see that many people in the area don't live as comfortably as my host family. For example apparently many parents can't afford to give their children breakfast before school.

My first proper jungle walk with Victor began by entering the huge Monteverde national park not by a checkpoint, but by jumping over a locked gate. We found puma poo fairly soon. Eyes often had to be on the ground for snakes, especially in the more claustrophobic areas, which is very frustrating when everything looks like one. We walked for about an hour uphill, and shadows were growing. 'Now is when the big animals come out - we need to leave quickly' said Victor. Apparently without seeing a contradiction, he stopped to check his text messages and read them out loud excruciatingly slowly. 5 minutes later I heard a loud crashing, which turned out to be a large monkey. It was a nervous exit for me at least as it got darker, but we emerged into the light in good time.

Victor has some serious jungle experience - he described a time where he and a group was lost in the jungle for four days without food and had to live entirely from what they could find, one member of the group being seriously ill through eating undercooked monkey. Walking with him has involved stopping every 10 minutes for him to show me some fruit of a new taste, colour and shape, or litres of water hidden in a vine. Sugar cane is a favourite of mine, you chew it to release sugar-water which is very refreshing.

Another feature of my walks with Victor is finding waterfalls and snorkelling in them. This included the tourist choked La Fortuna falls, which are about 70m high. The challenge was to swim towards the falling point, but the current was so strong it was impossible – fortunately, as reaching them would be dangerous. Yancy (youngest daughter of family) came too and spent hours mucking about in the aquamarine pools below the falls. Another waterfall walk last weekend involved sightings of lots of animals, including coyote and some birds that looked like they were covered in playdough. We caught and ate crabs with our bare hands by lifting rocks in the waterfall. If I'd realised at the time that in Costa Rica an extended arm with a hand waved means 'come here' (everyone uses it that way) instead of 'stop', I would have seen a 2m snake on the narrow path ahead. However, not seeing it had its plus side!

Animals are everywhere. Birds seen include rare male and female quetzal, toucan. Pigeons in Ciudad Quesada, a small city nearby, were apparently a novelty, despite how small the flock was to me - they taste very good, apparently. Last weekend the whole family took a trip to the zoo - including a chance to get very close to a pregnant jaguar (not the car) in a tiny cage. A sad but profoundly spectacular sight, and it's good to think that for most Costa Ricans these animals are part of their ecosystem and culture, and thus hopefully the zoo can be a way of getting in touch with the fact that they have these neighbours. Yesterday I heard a tapping on my room door and opened it to find a colossal frog, as big as my foot, insisting on entrance (my room opens onto an open yard, and though there are other houses around the trees begin 20m away). Victor showed me a tree that takes 25 people stretching to link arms round it. Like a screen before a church altar the canopy prevented seeing any more than half way up.

Victor's views of native 'Indian' (indigenous Costa Ricans, who live in reserves but have generally adopted much of the surrounding culture) medicine are intriguing. He had been bitten by what I later learnt - as he eyed another one up in the zoo - was a fer-de-lance, one mean snake. On the third day afterwards he was given a boiled fer-de-lance head to drink by the indians who had found him. He prefers natural medicine, and claimed that the jungle earth can cure a huge number of things including cancer and dengue fever. Many people use it instead of Western medicine including in life-threatening situations.

The volcanic eruption in 1968, when the volcano (the top of which I can see looming 1700m high in the distance on a clear day as I walk to the school) became active, was something that hugely affected the people in this area. Victor says that one of the scientists who predicted it, but was ignored, had stayed at his father’s house for several years and urged him to strengthen it, which he did, and his house was the only one standing in that village afterwards. Many people were killed and several towns entirely destroyed, yet the fertility of the fields and the tourist boom that followed to see the frequent eruptions made those who had the money to invest in the new community afterwards rich.

I've heard some fascinating stories, earnestly told, about black magic, aliens, and religious experiences - unfortunately they are too personal for me to write here.

Is it me or are a significant proportion of the world’s tour guides short men with extravagant facial hair who seem to assume that all the unfortunate interests that their audience members have spent their measly, tragically deprived lives on, pale and must move aside for the privileged revelation that they bestow. And worse, as its guardians to have a mission of being so flamboyant and undignified that for their sake you just want to have a cup of tea, or lie down in a dark room? (This increases in proportion to the tackiness of the exhibit they are presenting). Despite this applying, one I talked to seemed a nice man.

Last weekend, watched all three lion king films in a row in spanish. If anyone's never seen the third, avoid it. Lion king song requests on the tin whistle are becoming infuriatingly frequent.

This week havebeen the two inaugural matches of the new Costa Rican national football stadium - the first against China, the Chinese government having payed for the stadium. Victor was once in a championship winning premier league team, before Costa Rican football was professional. It's a very popular sport here. This morning was school sports day. The heat was like being continually beaten with a stuffy mattress and there was a small tornado of circling vultures high above the sack races, high jump, football and dancing. But it was all very languid and good natured - some parents sold frozen fresco in bags and there was a very chilled out atmosphere. I wanted to play, but establishing which inter year group was best was too important. I've played football at lunchtimes with half of the years groups now - most are 10 times more comfortable talking to me after having done so. To me they seem extremely good players for their age.

Costa Rican food has been fantastic, even though I'll never want to see rice and beans again afterwards. Rice and beans is the national dish of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and they argue over it as they do about most things - continuously exchanging the world record for the largest amount ever made. It's called gallo pinto - speckled rooster - because when you mix it the beans makes the rice speckled. My pick of the fruits I've tried that I'd never heard of before has to be guanabana - like a cross between melon and candy floss but the taste reminiscent of skittles. For every fruit, there is a 'fresco' - sugary squash made from it, often with milk, which the children go crazy for every breaktime in the canteen. Fried banana and plantain is also very tasty, mature ones become very sweet and green ones with added salt are like crisps - I've learnt the recipe. The school cook Sonia (who's also my host mum) was incredulous that in Inglaterra people just eat bananas or plantains as they come. Miel de coco - 'coconut honey' - is to the middle of a Bounty as fresh fruit is to the same fruit dried and days old. Having found that its possible and indeed easy to be vegetarian here I'm eating very little meat again now (but the odd crab...).

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