san carlos, CR

well i left tortuguero this morning, am on my way to nicaragua, and have reached the 3 month point in my trip! i was going to leave tomorrow but i wanted to take the boat out instead of a bunch of busses and the only boat was leaving today. it was rainy which kinda sucked, it would have been amazing if the sun had been out. but nevertheless we saw upwards of ten enormous crocodiles and those things are freakin huge. their teeth are really yellow too. so now im spending the night in a little city that people call san carlos even though its real name is different and it really confused me because the city im going to in nicaragua is also san carlos. eventually i understood though. my first main goal once in nicaragua is to go to ometepe which is an island made up of two connected volcanoes in the middle of a lake which just sounds cool. Tortuguero ended up being a blast and a half and i have more pictures of animals than i know what to do with. Elias, the guy in charge of the volunteers (there were only two of us) was a complete crack up. he had more energy than both of us combined and near the end of our stays he told us to guess how old he is. first of all, hes about 5 ´2" has a nice pot belly and a slightly graying mustache. we both guessed 50s somewhere, and with a huge laugh he shouts 66! and starts bouncing around in a boxing stance. he was a nut. we really did very little work while we were there. probably only worked about 4 of the days, and one of those was just raking the lawn. the coolest one was cutting the lawn with machetes. it actually just sounds cool cuz it sucked pretty bad in reality and i kept thinking id split my shin in two on the follow-through. im proud to say that they are still intact and working at maximum capacity. one of the days we went to the only hill in the area to look around. at the bottom there were tiny red poison dart frogs everywhere, some of which had blue legs. i felt like i was at the zoo, which i later felt weird about because when im at the zoo i should feel like im in the tropics not the other way around. but then we walked to the top and it was an amazing view of the islands and canals and the carribean. towards the end of the second week though we had seen so much that we ended up playing cards more than anything else. i taught the other volunteer casino which he of course loved. that will be one of my goals, spreading the wonders of casino wherever i go. one of the nights me and the other volunteer, who was from south dakota, made an american dinner of fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy and corn ie loads of grease and no vegetables. we all felt a bit sick afterwards. but it was wonderful to have a meal where the meat was a main course instead of starving-chicken legs on the side. or fried bologna. im looking forward to better food in the near future, though truthfully the food at tortuguero was pretty good. we introduced elias to banana pancakes which were a big hit. my art project for tortuguero was carving a frog out of coconut, which is really pretty if you sand it down past the fuzzy stuff. and i am proud to say that it is very recognizable as a frog. and on top of it i broke off two fingers on one of his hands so now it looks like hes making the hang loose sign. so we named him the hang loose frog. well thats all that comes to mind now. the next time i write i should be in nicaragua! hoping for the best for everyone, miss you all.
gus