Homestay Part One: Sloths, sloths, sloths, sloths, sloths, EVERYBODY!

Predictably, since I got to San Jose, I've been too busy running around on the weekends to remember to post.  Tomorrow, we're going back to Las Cruces, where the internet is questionable at best, so I thought it best to post now.

For the past two-and-a-half weeks, I've been staying with a wonderful host family and taking intensive Spanish.  My family consists of a host mom, or "Mamatica", named Olga, her husband, two sons, one of whom lives in an apartment behind the house with his girl friend.  I've been joined by a fellow foreigner, Nico, who is from Germany.

While this has been a wonderful experience and I have gained lots of experience making a fool of myself in two languages, it's nowhere near as exciting as my weekend adventures!  Our program graciously allows us two two-day weekends during our homestay here*.  For me, that meant one thing:  Sloths.

As you may or may not know, Costa Rica is home to the world's only sloth sanctuary.  I found out about this wonderful place through this video, which has saved my sanity many, many times and makes pretty much  any day better.  As it turns out, these sloths live only a few kilometers from Cahuita, a small Caribbean beach town with a lovely national park.  Five friends and I arrived late Friday night on a bus.  Turns out, you can get a bus from San Jose to just about anywhere on the cheap.  You just have to be pretty flexible with that whole time/bus stop location thing.  That's pretty much par for the course, though.  The streets in San Jose don't really have names, so faith has become my most-used navigation skill.

In the morning, we booked it to the National Park for snorkeling.  At first, we didn't know what to expect; our guide was some guy named Kenry that the hostel owner knew, and it seemed like it would be fun, but pretty low-key.  Then we got in the water for some the best snorkeling of my life.

Cauhita National Park.  Clear water, beautiful coral, and lots of fish.

In only two hours, we saw two different reefs.  Between my group of six alone, we saw a nurse shark, octopi, a mana ray, lion fish, and many, many parrot fish.  At one point, I was surrounded by a school of around eighty beautiful blue fish, all bigger than my hand.  My big find of the day was a French Angel fish.  It was about a foot and a half long, and looked something like this, but brighter:

The moral of a story is to trust your hostel owners.  If they say their man Kenry is the best, he is.

After that amazing, adventure, it was time for sloths!  The sloth sanctuary hosts old sloths, baby slothes, three toed-sloths, two-toed sloths, sloths that can be rehabilitated, and sloths that will spend their lives at the sanctuary.  All are well taken care of, and all are adorable.

Two two-toed twins.  You can tell by the adorable pig-snouts.

This three-toed sloth is named Toyota because he's indestructible.
He's at the sanctuary after being electrocuted by a electric pole,
which is apparently quite the problem for sloths.  

This is Snickers, a baby two-toed sloth.  Apparently, sloths are cold-blooded, which is funny as watching them escape from their cages, cling to their friends, and climb around branches warms the cockles of my heart.

So cute.  So wonderful.  And, while all of these sloths will have to spend their lives at the sanctuary  every year, dozens more get re-released into the wild.  Sadly, with more and more roads and electricity poles encroaching on the sloths' natural habitat, more and more sloths need help.  Visiting the sanctuary and engaging in gratuitous cooing over the little beasties supports a good cause.  Catching the sloths and declawing them so they can be pets doesn't.  They are, sadly, solitary little critters... except for the ecosystem of moss and parasites they carry around in their fur.

After meeting the sloths, we went on a canoe ride around the sanctuary.  On our way, we saw a sloth that had recovered enough to venture out on its own, fruit bats, a caiman, monkeys, and leaf cutter ants

Teeming with life.  And likely, bacteria.

 The rest of the evening was spent drinking in the Caribbean culture with a live reggae band.  And, in the morning, we hit up the national park again to say goodbye to the sun and the sand.  With that, we rejoined our family in San Jose.  Until the next weekend, that is!

Life's a beach. 

My face, every time I remember it's February. 

*If you're really observant with dates, you'll notice that I also had one one-day weekend.  A group of us went to Jaco for a few hours on our first Sunday here.  It provided invaluable experience learning to deal with the vagaries of Costa Rican transportation system, but other than that, it was just another day at the 90 degree, cloudless beach of soft sand, and hardly worth mentioning.  Quite frankly, the water was a little too warm for my tastes...