Photo essay on Costa Rica

Photo Essay Wednesday… Costa Rica

/ Curt Mekemson / 26 Comments
This fellow is a JC lizard from Costa Rica. Like Peggy and me, he likes to hang out in interesting places.

Today marks the beginning of a new series for me: Using Wednesdays for photo essays. When you hang out with cameras in lots of interesting and often beautiful places, as Peggy and I do, you end up with a few photos. Right? Our digital collection is approaching 90,000! What in the heck do you do with all of those photos? I have mainly used ours to illustrate blogs. Usually that involves looking at a hundred or so photos and reducing them down to 20 or 30. I’ve decided to use a few more by doing a “Photo Essay Wednesday.” It will be light on writing and heavy on photography. I’ll simply scroll through our photos, pick out an interesting subject, and download the photos onto WordPress. Voila!

It has an added advantage of being quick, which my more writing-focused posts aren’t. Given that I am now well into my next book, It’s 4 AM and a Bear Is Standing on Top of Me, I need to free up all the writing time I can.

My first photo essay is based on a trip Peggy and I made to Costa Rica in 2012. I blogged about it at the time but I am going to assume that most of you weren’t reading my posts then. Grin. Without further ado…

Costa Rica is a beautiful country that includes mountains and seashores on both the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Peggy and I spent time in both settings.
Monteverde.
Much of the country is covered in rainforest.
Which includes strangler figs like this. I think Tarzan would be excited.
Peggy spent a lot of time with binoculars looking for monkeys. We were up on a high walkway that perched above the rainforest when I took this photo.
This was the view down. We were fascinated with how this light green tree stood out in a jungle of dark trees.
We also visited a coffee plantation where Peggy was invited up to learn how to be a coffee taster. Sip and spit.
As you might expect in the tropics, plant life was both interesting and impressive, as with this daisy like flower.
Know what this is? It’s the head of an opening fern.
And how about this. It’s a want-to-be bunch of bananas waiting to grow up.
On a jungle night hike we found this colorful fungus…
And these strange ants guarding their perch. I was careful to keep my fingers at a distance.
One afternoon, a family of coatis stopped by for a visit. Their tails were quite impressive.
We rented a canoe and paddled into the jungle on the Caribbean coast. Crocodiles lurked in the shadows along the way.
While we enjoyed all of the areas we visited, my favorite was Corcovado.
This was our home.
One day we looked out and saw a boa constrictor slithering across our lawn. Of course it was a photo op we couldn’t pass up. The boa wasn’t very happy with me chasing him down and decided to coil up. 🙂
Down on the beach we discovered a treasure trove of skulls some naturalist had gathered.
I am always fascinated by carvings and traditional art, so I conclude my first photo essay with three. This guy reminded me of what we found lurking along the Caribbean Coast.
A sufficiently scary mask.
A Mayan sculpture and someone you would not like to meet on a dark night. That does it for my first Wednesday Photo Essay. Who knows where we will be next Wednesday. I don’t.

NEXT POSTS: 1) Clickety Clack 3. We travel home from Washington DC, to Chicago, to LA and back to Sacramento on Amtrak. 2) A preview of Peggy and my travel plans and blogs for 2020.