Costa Rica 1992: At An Eco- Lodge

      During the cruise I went up to the front of the cabin to watch the river in front of us.  The boat captain, a native Indian-looking guy was steering the craft and he ask me where I was from.  In our conversation he asked if I had any Canadian coins he could look at, saying he was interested in foreign coins.  I dug into my pack and showed them the coins I had, and just gave them to him.  I was never sure if he was really that interested in coin collecting or just wanted to add to his income.  Either way, it was okay with me.

    Elin-Elin, the lodge where we stayed provided us with a nice room and serving up delicious food.  Before we went to bed, Claudia one of the nature guides told us we should get up at 5:30 for a bird walk.  She offered to wake us, but we told her we could wake ourselves, which we did, and we were ready to start at 6:00.  Surprisingly by that time, Claudia still hadn’t made the rounds to wake the others, but I suspect it was because of the heavy morning rain that was falling.   Fortunately the rain slowed, and it became very light by the time the group started off.

    Bird and nature walks don’t worked well with big groups as they do when it is just my wife and I on our own.  Big groups make a lot of noise and disturbance, and as a result we saw only a few birds, but were very happy to finally see one of those tiny orange, poison dart frogs.  At one point on our trek, my wife stepped in some mud and sank up to her knee.

    The group was back to our hotel by 8:00, in time for breakfast.  It included:  orange juice, toast, fruit slices, rice and beans, with eggs.  During our breakfast, Claudia made some announcements to the group.  The communications on the tour were pretty bad.  It was very difficult to hear what Claudia says, and her announcements never seem to give all of the details we need to know, like the time of the activity and what exactly the activity is.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Snow Day

     I have always loved snow and looked forward to snowfalls.  I assume those feelings have something to do with the “snow days” I experienced when I was a kid.  

    I grew up in Southern Indiana, where we didn’t get a lot of snow during the winter.  We would get maybe five of six snowfalls, a few of which dumped enough of the white stuff on the ground (and roads) to bring things to a halt.  When that happened, a “Snow Day” was declared by the School Board.  That meant that the school buses didn’t run, and schools were open only for those kids that could get there. 

    Since we relied on the school bus, we didn’t have to go to school, and with all that fresh snow on the ground, we would bundle up in our warm winter boots, gloves, coats, and hats and pull our sleds over to nearby Clearcrest Country Club, to spend hours zooming down the best hills around.  Being a golf course, the snowy fairway hills were bare of trees, but outlined with small groves of tall pine trees along the edges. 

    On one particular snow day when I was in the sixth grade, a group of all my neighborhood friends headed for the golf course with our sleds.  After many of runs straight down the best hill at top speeds, we got bored and sought more adventurous runs.  We continued to start down the hill from the top, but then mid-slope, we would swerve to the left, over toward the fringed edge of the grove, where we began weaving back and forth between the scattered trees on its edge.  It was probably dangerous, but we found it exciting fun.

    The next day when the snow day ended, we were anxious to get back to school to tell our friends and  brag about the exciting day we had sledding.  However our sledding stories fell flat when we heard the much better stories told by those kids who had made it to school on the snow day.  Since there were so few kids that had come to school, instead of having to go to their regular classes, they were allowed to go down to the gym and play basketball all day.

    I was green with envy, having missed the fun of getting to play basketball all day in the gym.  I made up my mind that on all of the upcoming snow days I would find someway to get to school, instead of staying at home.

    Following that, whenever we had a snow day, I would ride with my father when he drove to work, and get out at the school, so I could spend the day playing basketball.  Snow day, after snow day, I made sure I got to school, but every single time, instead of spending the day playing basketball, we had to spend the day in our regular classes.

    I was a fool clinging to the never occurring hoop dream, when I could have been outside at the golf course on my sled, zooming down the hills. 

View my paintings at:   davidmarchant2.ca

I Often Don't Know What It Is That I Am Painting

     The other day I read a news article about “secret things” in famous paintings.  One of those “secrets” was the image of the artist in the reflections of a shiny object in the painting. “Wow,” I thought, “I have done that.”

    My paintings are based on photos I have taken.  I download the photo onto my computer, then place a 2 by 2 inch grid over that image.  I paint just one of those squares created by the grid at a time, and so when I am going to paint that square, I zoom in on it on my computer, so I don’t see anything else.  I then just try to paint the corresponding square on the canvas (that also has a grid of two inch squares) what I am seeing in that square on my computer screen.  

    Because I have zoomed in on just one square, I often can’t tell what it is that I am painting.  I just paint what I am seeing in the square.  Later on, when more squares have been painted, I am often surprised at what it was I was painting.  This happened to me the other day, after painting a couple of squares with different shades of blue.  I discovered it was some mountain slopes.

    The photo above is taken from my painting “Chrome” which shows the chrome vertical strip on the side of the grill of my old 1977 GMC truck.  If you use a bit of imagination you can make out my distorted reflection on that strip.  (photo above).

     The flesh-colored blob in the top is my head, and the blue color below it is the blue shirt I was wearing.  The two vertical areas in the middle are my hands, which are holding my black camcorder.  The darker blue in the lower section are my jeans.  Can you make all that out from the distorted reflection on the side of the truck’s grill?

    Below is the whole painting.

View my other paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Cruise Down a Jungle River

      The bus then took us to a river, where we boarded a nice-sized river boat with a large enclosed cabin for passengers.  The vessel took us on a comfortable and interesting voyage down a 70 kilometer long tropical river to the resort.  

    At the beginning of our voyage we had passed through recently cleared pastures with the odd dead naked tree, remnants of the jungle that had once occupied that space, but once the boat got to Tortuguero Park, the scenery we were passing through became even more jungle-like, with the thick growth of plants and trees forming a thick wall of green that came straight up from the river.  We could not see any river “bank”, just a solid solid wall of tropical foliage. 

    The boat traveled slowly along the river which snaked its way through the visually exciting jungle.  A lot of exotic birds flew from their perches on the tall trees that lined the river as our boat approached, and monkeys gave us the eye as we passed by.  A girl on the trip who had lived in Brazil told us the scenery we were passing through looked just like an Amazon River trip she had gone on.  Floating down a tropical river was sure a relaxing and memorable way to view the jungle.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Banana Factory

      While back at Infotur in San Jose, we booked ourselves onto a group tour, something we had never done on a vacation before.  Generally we just take buses to the places we want to go, then wander around on our own.  This tour was to take us to Tortuguero s to watch sea turtles crawling out from the ocean up to the beach at night, to lay their eggs.  The tour included transport (bus and then a cruise on a boat), meals, and a room at Hotel Ilan-Ilan (an eco-resort) for three days and two nights.  It cost $189 each plus $40 a night.  

    We had to cash some more Traveler Cheques to pay for the package tour, and while we were flush with money, my wife bought a new umbrella, another big one.

    We began our Tortuguero Tour outside a McDonalds at 7:30.  The bus drove us through pouring rain, which caused the planned stop at a jungle park to be cancelled, and then a planned tour of a banana plantation to be cut short, although we did make a brief stop at the banana factory to watch the workers wash and put stickers on the bananas. 

        We were surprised (and somewhat dismayed) to discovered that when the bananas start to form on the trees, the whole growing bunch is enclosed in a pesticide-infused plastic garbage bag-sized sack, where they will continue to grow.  When the green banana bunch is starting to ripen, the sacked bunch is cut from the tree, suspended on a moving cable, which ferries them to the factory where the bananas are washed.  In the photo below, on the right side, you can see a woman removing the sack from a bunch of green bananas.

        We found the whole pesticide-laden sack thing rather disturbing.  Every day when we cut up a banana for our cereal, we never visualized that they were grown in pesticide bags.  I guess sometimes its better not to know how commercial things are grown.

    View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: Last Day in the Cloud Forest

      At one point along the trail, we could hear fruit or nuts falling through the trees.  That excited us, making us think there was some exotic bird up there.  We scanned the foliage eager to see what was doing it.  We were deflated when we discovered it was just a squirrel.

    As we plodded on down the trail, my wife in the lead, I heard a flutter of wings, then she began cursing.  A blue and green bird had been on the trail in front of us which my wife hadn’t seen until it flew off in a rush.  It was a Resplendent Quetzal.

    When we got to the hummingbird gallery we were again fascinated by the unbelievably colored hummers, fighting and darting around at the feeders.  A heavy rain began to fall, so we paid $5 to stay and watch a fascinating slide presentation about animal coloration.  The leaf-shaped moths were hard to believe.  Some other moths looked like wasps and bees to avoid being eaten.

    By the time the slide show finished, the rain had also stopped, so we walked the three kilometers back to our hotel, watching the yellow sunset over the mountains.

    When we got back to the hotel we got a surprise.  The clerk informed us that InfoTur, back in San Jose had called us, and we were supposed to contact them when we got back to San Jose, because we had won a prize.  We were quite excited by the news, remembering being told that some of the prizes were tours.

    We forced ourselves out of bed at 5:00 AM the next morning, to organize ourselves before catching the 6:00 bus to San Jose.  We carried our luggage to the cheese factory where we caught the bus.  The road was again full of hills, twists, and turns, but much smoother than the one we had taken us to Monteverde.  There were a lot of beautiful views of the sun hitting the clouds as we traveled. 

    My wife was in a bad mood in San Jose.  The bus driver had broken our black umbrella which she had strapped to her bag.  We weren’t able to get the room we wanted at the hotel, and then when we walked down to InfoTur to claim our “prize”, it turned out to be a flimsy-thin T-Shirt, instead of a free tour.

View may paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: A Palm Viper and Morre Jungle

      Continuing on our way to the Reserve, we came upon a meter-long, slender snake with a cream-colored underside.  It had just started to cross the road in front of us, but then turned around, went slithering through some grass, then up a tree.  I struggled to get the telephoto lens onto my camera, but it was already up in the tree by the time I did.  I managed to take a photo of it from below, as it strung out across some branches above me.  

    When I described it later at a slide presentation, the naturalist thought it sounded like a palm viper, which is toxic.  I was happy it didn’t drop down on me when I was taking its photo.   We also watched a three inch lizard that seemed to hop instead of crawl.

    We paid another $10 each once we got to the Reserve entrance and took the el Camino, a 2 kilometer old road.  We saw a flock of birds the size of crows, that were blue like a Canada Jay, but they had a powder blue “cap’ on their heads.

    We were eager to go to the “Mirador” (overlook), but unfortunately but the area around it was totally clouded in, so we couldn’t see much on the self-guided trail.  It was however, very beautifully lush with all of the leaves of the jungle plants dripping with the condensed water from the clouds that surrounded them.

    We met some girls who also happened to be from BC.  They asked us where we were from and when we told them McBride, one said, “Oh, that’s where they are having the forests fires.”   That was not something we wanted to hear, but since they had just left Vancouver two days earlier, we could only assume that the Robson Valley was still having problems during our first week of being away.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant.ca