Mud and Humidity

This station was the perfect place to wind up the course. Cabo Blanco is part of an Absolute Reserve (the highest level of protection, one of only a few places in the world to be designated as such) and is located at the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula on the Pacific coast. Every single thing in the reserve is protected, even from scientists. We could observe, but couldn't harm anything in doing our work. We only did one project here, since we were all frantic to get our papers finished and turned in. My group's project involved doing a snorkeling survey of fish in the lagoon--yes that is science, thank you very much. We had these awesome pieces of 6 inch PVC pipe that we wore around our wrists and kept our fish tallies on.
As you can see from the photos, the station is pretty rustic, that's the main building where the kitchen, dining and some sleeping areas were located. There were no walls around the dining areas, and we would get visited by raccoons and mosquitoes while we ate. There were also several hammocks around the station. A pretty good field day would be: take a survey in the morning, be finished by 10:30 so you can get be there when the fresh bread comes out of the oven for snack time, take a nap, lunch, maybe another nap, and work on papers the rest of the day.
We saw so many incredible sunsets from this station. There was a ritualistic sunset-swim that most of us took part in. We did have one day of fun after all our papers were in. We visited the waterfalls (as you can see, we could walk right up the rocks), did some non-scientific snorkeling, and spent time in the hammocks. We were all sad to leave.