Blogs from Central America Caribbean - page 1934

First of all, I am no volcanologist. So, bear with me, because I might use the wrong technical words for what I saw... The Pacaya volcano is an active volcano located approximately 30 km South of Guatemala City. Its summit is at 2552 mt. It is considered a "stratovolcano", which means it is tall, conical, has periodic, explosive eruptions, its lava is highly viscuous, cool and hardens before spreading too far (out of shame for writing something way too wrong, I just got this from Wikipedia). After approx 100 inactive, Pacaya erupted in 1961 and has pretty much been active since then. Its active cone is called the MacKenney cone, and its located on the SW of the volcano. Until this year, there was another crater, called "Cerro Chino", to the NW of the volcano. This ... read more

Hey... well I've been here a week. Its hard to get access to good computers here so I'll take the opportunity to get some pictures up here. Just hanging out at a surfy town this weekend. Work at Profelis, centre for wild cats, is such an awesome experience but pretty tiring. We're busy doing behaviour research for ocelot and margay since there isn't much published on these cats at all, and we have the opportunity to introduce some novel behavioural enrichment and measure its effects. Its a great challenge discussing the ins and outs of a project with the directors in spanish but we manage! They are really appreciative and cooperative here, and I'm happy to say the standard of animal welfare is very high. Actually, the jaguarundi stand out the most in the centre. The ... read more

We never made it to the contractor, nor did we get to do any fun/touristy stuff on Sunday or any other day this week. Sunday we spent the whole day driving around Costa Rica looking for stores that we never found. It should have served as a preview for what lay in store for the rest of our week. Monday, we drove around shopping for all sorts of stuff, finding some of what we had been looking for to turn the house into a working inn. We also had our first Spanish class scheduled, but in true Tico style the teacher never showed up, and after a half hour he rescheduled for Tuesday. Tuesday I spent almost two hours at the government-run phone company working to change the phone lines over to our names. After waiting ... read more

Intro to Boquete Under Construction. Our Experience So, we arrived at Boquete after dark and it started to drizzle. Lovely. Additionally, Boquete is in the mountains so it was a cool drizzle. Extra lovely. We tried one hotel - full. We tried a second hotel (in the opposite direction) - full. We stood under an awning trying to find another hotel, and a lady in a pickup randomly drove up and asked us if we needed a nice hotel to stay at with a private bathroom for $7.00 USD per person. Um... yes, absolutely. Funny how things work out. Joe was just blown away at bad luck gone good luck. Joe's Note: Not only did this place work out for us at just the right time, this place turned out to be truly amazing in general. ... read more

Wow....I'm in Cartago, which used to be the capital of Costa Rica and the travel blog doesn't even have it as an option to list as my location....terrible... So I'm in Cartago now, and it's great here, but it's not like living on the coast. Life is a lot different here. For one thing, it's a lot colder. Last Monday I was wearing a sweater and jeans! I'm living in a gated community called "the foundation" (oooh how inviting, haha) with another young family in their twenties (Rosa and Carlos) and their five year old daughter, Amanda....and a little dog name Rane (sounds like Ronnie). They're super nice, but don't speak as much English as the last family. But it's a good thing because I'm forced to use my Spanish...or lack thereof. It's definitely beautiful here: ... read more