FSU Gap Year Blog #5
Over the course of planning and considering all the different things that I might encounter on my gap year, I tried my best to prepare for anything. Inevitably, things happen (like getting robbed, as I detailed in the previous blog) and things still take you off-guard. I had plenty of those experiences as I left my urban temporary home of Curridabat and made the full-day trek (by several bus rides) to rural Ostional.
In Ostional, and by extension in most of the Guanacaste Province, there’s no hot water. None. The main reason for this is it gets so hot and stays so hot at all times in Guanacaste that cold water is all that’s needed (this includes showers). My homestay family also told me that using hot water all the time is bad for your skin. Of course, not using hot water saves money so that’s probably another reason for it, but either way for the last ~6 weeks of my Costa Rica trip, I had none for anything, a fact which I pretty quickly got used to, much to my surprise. In addition, transportation was VERY limited while I was there. There were probably 5 cars total in Ostional, with a dozen motorcycles as well. The only way to drive to a town with greater than 25 people without having one of those was to get driven somewhere. The price for a round trip 20–30 minute car ride was nearly $70 (!!!) USD. As such, in my 6 weeks in Ostional, I only ever left the tiny confines of this tiny, tiny town one time, for Thanksgiving. The Costa Rican version of American Thanksgiving food was quite good, and all my friends from the sea turtle research center came.
Oh wait, did I not mention what I was actually *doing* in Ostional? That’s right, Ostional is a beach community which is one of the few places in the world that has the distinction of being a turtle nesting ground. As such, my job over those incredible 6 weeks was to collect and/or record all kinds of data on turtles. What kinds of data? I’ll detail all of that in the next blog!
