Primates Are Our Mates

Another week has gone by and we have worked mostly at the Rescue Centre. We had a heavy week of rain but a beautiful day on the beach yesterday. When the sun is out here it's pretty hot so a couple of hours on the beach is enough to fry even us sun worshippers. Here is a video of one day last week when we were in the monkey cages so you can see what they are really like. (Having trouble with video upload but working on it!) For those of you on facebook you can see it there.

Today Rene has taken a bus to San Jose, the capital city to pick up Julia from the airport tonight. It's technically not that far away but the bus takes 4 - 5 hours because the roads are not exactly great here. Hopefully she will land safe this evening and Rene will bring her down here tomorrow for her three week holiday. We think she will love it here especially when she gets to meet all the animals!

So today I went to work on my own and was in charge of the afternoon in the jungle shift. This entails watching the monkeys play in the tree's until they are tired then they insist on a sleep on the blanket. The ones pictured here are all aged between 3 months and 2 years old, are all orphans and gradually being rehabilitated back into the wild with our daily jungle trips!

Room at the Inn

They just keep on coming, orphaned wild animals that is. A couple of baby sloths have just been bought into the centre due to their mothers being killed by dogs. The one with a stripey face is a three toed sloth and the ligher coloured one is a two toed sloth.

Our job yesterday was to run the creche at the rescue centre. This entailed looking after/feeding these two sloths, four baby possums, two infant monkeys and a 6 week old squirrel. We got a rug out on the grass and sat round them and made sure that they got a bit of sunshine but kept them protected from the hungry hawks that lurked overhead as we fed them.

Our next job was to take the monkeys to the jungle for their 2 hour play on their favourite tree. However, once out of their cages, the wild monkeys caused such a stir again that our rescue monkeys all dispersed in different directions. Have you ever tried chasing a monkey?? Likelyhood is that unless you are Seb Coe, they will win. It was about 80f and after about an hour of trooping back and forth through harsh jungle flora and fauna and having lost half a stone (didn't mind that bit!), we managed to get them all back together by bribing them with bananas, not by speed that's for sure! It's absolutely exhausting work but most enjoyable. The cycle ride home from the centre usually takes us about half an hour but we always stop for a drink on the beach to reflect on our day, and how lucky we really are. Also because we are too exhausted to ride all the way home in one go!!

Rene with one of the older sloths, having a dance!

A Monkey In The Hand Is Worth Two In The Bush

This beauty on my lap is Coonga. She was a rescue monkey at the Centre but now is wild, well wildish! She is still keen on human cuddles and hand cut fresh fruit and comes down the tree from her now natural habitat to spend time with the humans and rescue monkeys on their daily outing to the jungle. Today she sat on my lap for half an hour. She is very cuddly and we think she is pregnant too!

Every day the 9 rescue monkeys get taken to the Jungle just outside the Centre for their two hour play come rain or shine. There are a couple of older females in the group that are almost ready to go wild, and they are around two and half years old. There is a male howler monkey that sits and waits for them and he is we think the father to be of Coonga's baby as we have seen them being intimate. Anyway this fellow is pictured on the right, with the white balls! He is definately a male. He comes close enough to check us out and all the rescue monkeys playing, but never close enough to humans to touch. We just admire him from afar, whilst he admires all the teenage female monkeys in our troop! The younger monkeys are really scared of him and they all go a bit crazy when he appears, so we have to hold them tight by their tales until they calm down!

Also today, I was looking after a baby squirrel, who's mother got killed by the electricity wires, and he - Leno is now care of the centre until he is old enough to fend for himself. The picture is not that great but he is really tiny.

Oh and today I got bitten by one of the naughty monkeys, on the arm. It's okay though, no permanent damage done, we just have to be a bit careful when they reach that funny age. Same as teenagers really, you never know what to expect!

Days Like These

We are not entirely sure if we are lucky, jammie or blessed, but our house sitting job just got extended today by another 3 - 4 weeks until March! To top that, the sun was out and glorious for the first time in a while. Bikini's on, bikes ready and off we went to explore a bit and see the sea. A beautiful gecko decided to snooze on one of our bike wheels whilst on the beach, and then of course we ended up having lunch and a beer in a lovely cafe opposite the beach.

We are meeting with someone who's in real estate this week who knows somebody who's

looking for housesitters in the spring, and to run their hotel whilst they are away for a few months. That could be interesting. That's the beauty of a trip like this..if you have no plans, anything can happen and it pretty much is. I had a guilty moment whilst sitting at the cafe today, looking at the sea, and I asked Rene if it was bad, that we weren't working and sitting there on a Tuesday afternoon...and he replied 'no' and ordered two more beers!

Lots of people have been asking me what the town is like so I have added a new page to the blog and spent the rest of the day taking pictures of town for you to see. See the Around the town link.

A Day In The Life

So, it's a Sunday, two days after new years eve and we had a lovely day on the beach yesterday, recovering from N.Y.Eve, but today's a bit overcast. What to do??... We decided to head into town to go to get some groceries, and I wanted to go to a cafe which does a book exchange where for about £1.50 you can do a swap and it's a nice cafe too, with part inside/outside gardens.

Whilst we were there we saw the loveliest tiny orange frogs, and a very big sloth climbing along the fence! It's not the sort of thing that you would see when visiting Borders for example! That's very typical here though, it's like we have invaded the space of all these beautiful creatures and something as simple as shopping for a book can involve all sorts of encounters with wildlife!

After that, one of the local bars beckoned us....well it's £1.00 a beer and it's a Sunday, so why not?? We called our neighbours who were kicking about at home and asked them to join us... a few beers later, chats with various passers by, it was nearly dark and we still had to get groceries and cycle home. The bike ride home is only on two roads and about half a kilometre, but they are both very bumpy, potholed roads/tracks and quite challenging in the dark, with no lights, so we got a shifty on.

Back home, I convinced Rene to make some of his famous chips with fish. He's always happy to oblige in that respect and they are heavenly! But first, we had to feed our three stray dogs and two hungry cats awaiting our return on the porch! We wish we could adopt them all permanently but it's not our home and we have no fixed abode, so we will just take care of them for now. The little kitten is a lot better following our vets visits thankfully. Back to work with the monkeys tomorrow, we can't wait to see what developments have taken place with the monkeys courtships in our absense.

New Year and So On..

It's almost time to wish you all a happy new year, so we will do it now before we get distracted by other things. We have been invited to a New Years Eve Party tomorrow night at some neighbours (meaning about 1/4 kilometre deeper up into the jungle) house who plays the drums/bongo's. We will be attempting to fill in with our guitars. We better practice our Reggae rhythms! There is a great party atmosphere in town for New Year, they even have Dj's playing latin and reggae outside the supermarkets, very loudly!

It's been pretty much raining the whole of Christmas week though. We almost packed a beach bag this morning as we saw a glimmer of sun, but by the time we'd brushed our teeth and downed a coffee, the rain had started again. See the video, that's the garden and surroundings of the house that we are sitting. The house on the hill opposite is derelict so no onlookers, just jungle and random wild creatures, adopted pets and us.

We are managing to keep ourselves amused though and our very kind friends keep giving us a lift to do grocery shopping. We are on the lookout for some sort of vehicle ourselves that has more than two wheels and a roof, as grocery shopping on a bicycle in the rain isn't much fun! The price of 2nd hand vehicles here is shocking, and there is a very limited choice. For $4000 you can buy what would cost about £500 at home and is just about ready for scrapping. So if anyone has any import contacts in Central America...good business idea!

Ok Happy New Year to you all, hope that it's a great year ahead for everyone.

Christmas in Costa Rica

In summary....it's been wet!! On Christmas day though the sun shone for a few hours, just long enough fortunately to attend the two outdoor events that we had planned.

First of all, we were the entertainment at the soup kitchen Charity Xmas dinner. We have to admit, we had had a very lovely and late night with our neighbours on Christmas Eve and didn't have much song in us on Christmas day! We managed to pull it out of the bag though, with the help of our neighbour and fellow volunteer Jana providing harmonies and tambourine percussion. We performed a selection of sorts of Christmas carols, including a Spanish one, and some random pop/blues songs during lunch! So the indigenous people of Costa Rica were not only nutritionally nourished but experienced a brief history of British/American pop music on Christmas day. I'm not sure that they would thank us for the latter but the organisers and fellow ex-pat volunteers seemed to be tapping their feet!

Following that, we attended a party in the botanical gardens where we met lots of fellow ex-pats and made some new friends. It's funny, that here the term 'neighbours' takes on a different meaning. Despite being friendly people, we barely knew the people in our street back home, but being in a country that is not ones own, has an effect of making the most unlikely people bond. I guess it's that old tribal instinct in us all, and that there must be something about being in the minority that makes us stick together.