For my final trip I took a ride over to Parque Nacional Tortuguero - a common breeding ground for sea turtles. It was not a time when the sea turtles were there, but there are a beautiful series of canals and rain forest. The park is rather difficult to get to as after a certain point it is only accessable by boat. There are a variety of tours that go over to the area and provide transport from San Jose. I got a nice discount on this through my school and headed out. On our way over to the park, we stopped at a pineapple field. Find the piña in the photo...
SOme of the pineapple fields.
Also on the way to the park were many a banana field. Ah, the banana farms. Much could likely be written and said about bananas in Central AMerica, and I only know a super tiny piece of it. On these, like in many other farms and factories, labor is cheap to provide consumers (largely us) with cheap products. The workers do rather difficult labor, are not paid overly well, and in this case are subjected to all kinds of great pesticides. This is the final stage of the process, getting the bananas ready for shipment.
Here are the cleaning vats. The workers are sometimes provided housing, but this doesn't seem to make up for the low wages and potential health problems. In Costa Rica, most of the natives won't do this kind of work, and the labor is done by Nicaraguans who come into the country.
Bunches o' bananas. This whole experience was interesting for me... obviously I have/had awareness of the fact that Americans especially, and other countries as well, enjoy much material wealth. The fact that we have so much at a reasonably cheap price is often because of places like this where folks are doing pretty crappy labor at pretty crappy rates. Having a human face to it all definitely makes it all occur as a bit different.
A big freakin' beetle! We saw one of these guys at the park as well.
In most of the areas the women were working on different lines than the men.
We went to the "end of the road", than boarded a boat to get through the national park to an area with a village and some hotels and hostels. Here's while we were on the boat ride.
Once we were at the village, we took a little tour around - here's one of the local houses.
There are a few things needed for a Costa Rican village, one of them is a futbol field. Check.
The forest in the area of the national park were all secondary growth - ie, they had been cleared at one point, and had then regrown. Here are the remnants are one of the initial tree clearers.
One of the others needed for a Costa Rican village is a church. Check check.
Next, some more shots from Tortulandia.
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