Today we woke up nice and early, and walked to Veritas to
get on the bus to head out to our field trip. Jess and I weren’t exactly
excited, though we tried to make the best of it. We drove a few hours to a
biological research station called La
Selva, and instantly when we got off the bus I felt weak and dizzy again.
By now I had started to take a strong antibiotic for a stomach bug.
We immediately went on a long, three hour walk through the
rain forest. The rainforest is absolutely beautiful, but it looses it’s charm
after you’ve seen your thousandth tree or leaf cutter ant or tree frog. Also,
we had to stop almost every ten feet or so to talk about whatever species it
was we were looking at. Three hours of that was a little…much, to say the
least. I started to feel very dizzy and faint, and after dinner I asked my
professor if I could go to a clinic (equivalent to an emergency room). The
doctor told me that the antibiotic I was talking, as well as the intense
humidity and amount of physical exertion and sweating I was doing, made me
clinically dehydrated. He gave me an IV of a salt and sugar solution and sent
me home with orders to drink lots of water and Gatorade and rest.
When I got back the rest of the class went on their night
hike and I stayed in the cabins to sleep. The cabins were not air conditioned
and I continuously woke up in a pool of my own sweat finding it hard to
breathe. I woke up the next morning at 4:30 am to go on our early morning bird
watching hike (we saw only two birds in two hours, and they were of the same species),
but after that began to feel faint again so I decided to not go on the next
four hour, very strenuous, walk through the exact same route in the rainforest
that I had already seen. We finally went home after lunch.
The field trip wasn’t terrible, but it was not what I wanted
out of my stay here in Costa Rica. Jess, Karen, and I decided we wanted to talk to our program director, Lisa, about
how we felt we were given false advertisement as to how our study abroad trip
was going to go. That will have to happen tomorrow.
Here are some pictures of the creatures we saw, and of Jess and I looking really, really "excited", and a video of the area as we were driving home:
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