Costa Rica Scookum!

"United" has flown me to and back safely from Costa Rica and there's  more winter lying around than before I left in mid January. This plays with my internal time clock mechanism but I'll just have to live with that until time catches up. My childlike wonder did run away from me while visiting this l Nova Scotia sized country. It was everything I could have hoped it to be and so much more, it gave me reason to hope and believe - to have faith again. Maybe to take the expression pura vida to heart and our own west coast word for *ucking awesome - scookum! Whatever it was, it was amazing for me and my two sisters and brother. We all stayed at the comfortble Villas Tranquillas for most of a month outside a small sized town called Quepos. Of course we were there to escape this beautiful long-winded winter this year in Wakefield and the rest of Canada, but I stayed on and extra 2 weeks to wander around and explore and investigate what is going on with this eco-tourism experiment in Costa Rica. To prove to myself, perhaps as a mid-life crisis, that I could still do the backpacking thing and live on $25 a day!

My adventure began with a long walk down a rocky beach coastline in Dominical and Montezuma and didn't stop until I hit the mountains of the Monteverde cloud forest. I must have walked over 1,000 kms easy. As the good scientist I try to be, I've recorded and collected all sorts of digital and hand written information and memories that defy such manipulation which I'm thankful for! It is my hopes that I can tell a worthy story about how eco-tourism is doing in Costa Rica and where it is going. As an early leader with boat-loads of experience dealing with eco-tourism and protecting nature, Costa Rica is an important model for the dos and don't that other countries, including Canada, may share or learn from on this elsive path for "sustainable development". I'll have lots more to say and maybe share here as I mull over the evidence as I wait for winter to end.