It’s been a while since I have been in Costa Rica, and I was looking at some of my old photos… I found these to post - I thought you all might like to see!

Here is a dark church I found somewhere in Milan.

The final night we visited the volcano to watch the eruptions and watch the lava flow. The sounds it made were really unusual, like huge rocks crushing styrofoam - not entirely dissimilar to noises I hear when I share a room with Will.

Hey if you guys feel like being nice, you can nominate me for the photobloggies. That would be really swell of yall. Or not. Maybe you are too busy wasting time and looking at blogs and not working… so as long as you are doing that, why not nominate this?

There are a few categories on there that this blog satisfies, so feel free to copy and paste!

Here are a few more pictures from Costa Rica for you while you are voting…

We headed out to do some spelunking in the morning, but the bridge had collapsed. When we walked up to a bunch of workmen that were working on the bridge to find out how long it would be, they just looked at us like we were crazy for wanting to know something like that.

So we went back through Fortuna and to the other side of the Arenal dam to a natural preserve where they have all sorts of rope bridges, spiders, snakes, and other things that keep the couches of psychiatrists’ couches busy.

Here is a collection of pictures from the day. The first batch here is of a colony of ants we found. They were climbing up a tree on one side of the trail, cutting leaves, and taking them back across the trail, through branches and trees, and off to some destination we could not find. The third picture there is of the hundreds of leaves the ants dropped along the way. Strangely, the ants would not pick them back up, instead choosing to climb a 100 foot tree to go cut a new leaf. I do not understand this but I did not lose sleep over it.

Here is a frog that Will found while we were hiking. I asked him to pick it up but he ran away screaming like a little girl into the rainforest, where a boa promptly wrapped itself around his neck. Oh and another sunset picture too… what the heck.

No of course not… Well I am not and it is my blog so I guess you just have to see another one. The only thing better than seeing these sunsets is another T’Pol and Tucker scene (I think Tucker must work out).

I woke up this morning to find a deluge of comments on one of my volcano pictures on Flickr and I had to figure out what was going on. It turns out that one of the volcano pictures made it to the Flickr home page as one of the most “interesting” pictures for the day. They use some formula called “interestingness” that is a combination of views, favorites, and comments. If you click on the first picture below, you can see some of the comments…

I took this one from about 10 km from the west side of the dam that forms lake Arenal at the base of the volcano. I had the tripod set up for several hours trying to wait for the clouds to arrange themselves in the right way. The good thing was that it was so windy the whole scene changed every five minutes.

Here are two pictures of the lake in the morning and the evening. The lake was kind of eerie because it was huge and there was never anyone on it - no boats, no seaside towns… nothing. Also, sitting at the base of the volcano, I pictured all sorts of megalodons swimming around inside eating American tourists.

There was a dirt road that circumnavigated the volcano and I spent a lot of time going around and around looking for interesting things while listening to my ipod. The natives looked at me very strange when I would pop out of the car jamming to the ipod while carry a tripod. If they could speak English, I am sure they would say that all white people look alike.

Here are a few pictures I took during one of the drives.

From inside the rainforest, sometimes it is hard to tell if it is day or night. The greenery is so thick that sometimes almost no light at all makes it to the ground level. At night, it is absolutely hopeless to take even one step - you can’t even see the hand in front of your face.

I took these pictures on the same day of the same rainforest from two different perspectives.

Every morning the fog would roll in over the rainforest hills and make for a very surreal breakfast. I wish I had a flower-identification-friend that could help me identify these cool flowers I find, but so far all of my friends just know about video games and comic books.

After driving around and around and around the volcano on roads that barely qualify as roads and after hopping over barbed wire fence after barbed wire fence, I finally managed to find a nice shot of the volcano. It was not easy to get that horse to cooperate with me. I had to figure out how to say, “I am not a glue-man” in Spanish.

This is the most active volcano in Costa Rica and one of the most active in the world. Later days would take me up higher into the danger zone to get some rather suicidal shots. Those will be coming in a few days…

Our little cabin sat high on the hill at the base of the volcano (those pics coming soon I promise). We constantly had very nice views in every direction, unless Will happened to be in that direction, in which case we would ask him to move so we could once again have the nice view.

Here is another perspective of the interesting flower. I don’t know the names of any flowers or any trees; this is a major gap in my taxonomy and I am doing very little to fill the gap.

On the recommendation of a local, we took the CR Arenal Canopy tour at the base of the volcano. This is my second zip line thing and it was more intense than the last.

There are 12 platforms and 10 ziplines. The platforms are way up in the trees about 150 feet of the ground and the longest cable zipline is just over a quarter of a mile.

It begins with a horse ride up the mountain - a horse ride that we later learned results in the death of many horses on the trail during the tour itself. I am not sure if this knowledge would have been handy before embarking on the tour, but I am pretty sure it would have. The best thing was that we could be fairly assured that if one of the horses were to die, it would have been Will’s.

Here is a collection of some of the pictures of the event:

And here is the final picture. With that helmet and expression of distant disdain, it makes me think that Monty is preparing for an Arian Nation rally.