Ahh… another adventure!  This time I’ll be hiking with four Russians through the wiles of the edges of South America.

I’ve never been to South America.  How is this possible?  I don’t know… but I am now remedying that.  In fact, I’ve never been south of Costa Rica, and I have posted a favorite from there today.  That is of a volcano up near the border of Nicaragua.

Anyway, I’ll be spending a few days in Buenos Aires, Argentina before heading up into the Andes and edging into Peru.  There will be a lot of hiking, camping, and waking up at sunrise to shoot the glaciers.

Here’s a bit of a funny story about this trip.  So, I have a good Libertarian Kenyan friend who hooked me up with some of her simpatico friends in Argentina.  I mentioned that I was going to be doing some hiking in the Andes and I might pick up a sleeping bag while there, so I would not have to check one with my luggage.  They, in turn, hooked me up with one of the world’s top mountain climbers who was very nice.  He sent me an email saying he has the perfect sleeping bag for me in Buenos Aires and it would cost $700.  I thought “Jeez!”  And so then I got myself embroiled in this international chain of emails trying to figure out why a sleeping bag costs so much… like I am Buzz Aldrin camping on the moon or something.

Anyway, this chain of Libertarians has been very nice, but I decided to make it easy on everyone, so I just went to REI here in Austin to get something that should keep me and my camera gear cozy as I wait for the sunrise…

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).

Daily Photo: The Arenal Volcanic Plume

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.