Last week we left the Nicoya Peninsula, something we hadn’t done since arriving back in June. We braved the bumpy shuttle ride, the ferry, and the winding, mountainous taxi ride (Bilingual Baby lost her lunch all over me on that stretch). And after spending one night in Monteverde, we took another taxi over the mountain to the San Luis Valley.
We booked this trip to the Monteverde area for the cloud forest and the cooler weather, but it was a line from a blurb in our Lonely Planet book about the University of Georgia’s “drop dead gorgeous” campus that found us staying there. That, and the multitude of activities you could choose from (and the three meals a day in the dining hall). Lyon and I didn’t know if we were having flashbacks to college or summer camp. It was awesome.
Here is a recap of our stay in pictures and paragraphs:
Bilingual Baby made many amigos in the open-air student union. They were so sweet with her, and I think they liked that they could practice their Spanish with her.
At 6:30 in the morning on our first full day we met Fernanda, a naturalist intern, at the biodigester/ integrated farm. We milked a cow, saw how the biodigester worked, said hi to the pigs and fed the fish. Then Bilingual Baby ate her way through the organic farm. Fernanda and Aurora were impressed that she ate an entire raw radish—it was decidedly spicy, but she liked it. The biodigester from the farm provides hot showers for all the university students and the organic farm provides 25% of the food in the dining hall.
Later that afternoon we did a short cooking class with a woman (Katya) whose family has been in the San Luis Valley for generations. We made Biscocho and agua dulce and it was delicious. Katya had a three-year-old, so as you can imagine, Bilingual Baby played the entire time.
