This week of the course has been a little brutal. The schedule alone doesn’t look too bad, each day is relatively manageable. But when you add all of that together with no breaks, and add in the lingering effects of culture shock and the difficult climate, it becomes hard to handle. I’m doing my best, but definitely am starting to feel the effects. I’ve fallen a few days behind on my journal, and am constantly trying to sneak in naps. Bus rides are now something I look forward to as a time for rest, and I feel like I could sleep on a rock pile at this point.
The climate is definitely taking some adjusting to. Never in my life have I had a clean shirt in my dresser feel wet to the touch, but that happened to all of my cotton earlier this week.I’ve given up on having clothes smell good, only passable. We arrived in Manuel Antonio today, and I had to do the sniff test to everything I owned. Nothing would have passed back home, but more than half of my clothes met my new, lowered standard. If we can’t get laundry done here, I’m really gonna have to stretch to make my clothes last until las cruces.
The first two days this week were a kind of intersection between agriculture and ecotourism. We took tours of both a pineapple and a banana farm on Monday and Tuesday, both operating on very different scales. The pineapple farm was “small” only a few hundred hectares. In contrast, the banana farm was tiny. You could see the whole thing from the kitchen, and it was charming to know that the family could maintain the 200 or so trees on their own without help from chemical pesticides of fertilizers. The pineapple tour felt more like a well oiled machine, with a tractor driving us around the field with a very prepared seeming tie draft. They knew exactly where and when they were going to do each part. The banana tour on the other hand, felt more unscripted and genuine. We helped the woman find the right kind of sprout to dig out, some ripe bananas, and to plant the tree we had dug up. The cooking portion also felt more personal. Instead of bringing us out a platter of prepared food, they involved us in the cooking process, showing us how each thing was made.
Moving forwards in the week, we moved further away from angry culture and more into ecotourism, though we never fully separated the two. On Wednesday, we visited tortuguero national park. This was the definition of an exhausting rest day. We were slated to do a few tours and hang around the beach town, but after we finished with the tour of the estuary we made a b-line for the beach. After a brief safety discussion, a lot of people left to go walk the town or find souvenirs. Anetta, Eric, Madison, and I were the only people who stayed longer. This was a great time, but it was also a grave mistake. In the hour and a half or so I stayed in the water, I got one of the worst sunburns I’ve had in the last few years. My entire back was bright red and hot to the touch, as well as more than a little painful. This didn’t manifest until we got back home, I barely noticed it s we got out of the water. After we got out, we all went to this charming little beach bar in what appeared to be someone’s backyard. We had mango daiquiris, and I had some coconut water straight out of a coconut. This relaxing moment was very much needed, both for my body to recover and my mind to remember that were here to have fun.
Thursday planted the first seeds of doubt about ecotourism in my head. It started just like any other day, with grinding to get work done before class. Kate and I were working on our joint research project, measuring differences of particulate and chemical pollutants between freshwater and saltwater ecosystems. I whipped up the slides and helped form/edit the paper. After our presentation at 1:00, we were headed off to a chocolate and bats tur at tirimbina. This started off cool enough, learning about and trying different steps of the chocolate making process was ver pay interesting and very tasty. After this and dinner, we made our way to the bat are. After a presentation on very basic bat biology, they brought out 6 or so bats in tiny bags. This and the following rubbed me the wrong way. After they showed the bats to the people, and stopped pinching it, they would swoop off. This whole process felt very contrary to the whole idea of the tour. They had mentioned over and over how important and delicate these bats were, and then man handled them into these tiny bags for our entertainment. What really solidified my thoughts on this experience though was a an exchange between Wendy and the tour guide. She asked if this handling hurt the bats, and he said “yes, a little bit.” After that, the vibe got doscernably worse and more down after that,
These experiences hardly crack the surface of what ecotourism can be, but should help build the questions and experiences that need to be asked. The burning question, which I will not answer this week, is do the costs of ecotourism outweigh the multitude of benefits. From employment in the banana tour, to financial security for the pineapple farmers. These tours giving us a glimpse into their lives seemed a little invasive, but apparently not strong enough evidence of anything to allow us to domredpsearch. I look forward to breaking this issue down in the next meeting, and talking more in depth about this subject in next weeks 
Pura Vida!
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