Spending the night with snakes and frogs

 After spending two weeks in San Ramon, we had a firm grip on where all of the important things were in town. We knew where to find the bank, the bakery, the grocery store, the ice cream shop, the best pizza place in town, and the Chocolataria.

Since none of us were big on drinking, it took us one more week before we discovered the bars. For now though, we knew what we wanted, and how to get there.

A part of the USAC program is that you can sign up for an internship (which we didn't really make time for, we loaded up on classes) or, we would sign up to have a Tico friend, which is a student at the university that wanted to practice their English, and help us practice our Spanish. While I was assigned a Tico friend, we only met up once, and it was a part of a volunteer opportunity at Hotel Villa Blanca.

Annie, Manda, another USAC student (Jakob) and I got to spend the night here for an overnight research project. It had been recently discovered that there were some red-eyed tree frogs in the area, and our host, Roy, needed some help looking.

Hotel Villa Blanca is just above San Ramon, but the roads are rough so it was almost an hour drive to get there. The four of us were the first USAC students to be allowed on this amazing volunteer opportunity, so we were very honored.

The hotel also cares a lot about sustainability, and protecting natural resources. It's an amazing place to go, with great accommodations. http://www.villablanca-costarica.com/content/brochure

We didn't stay at the hotel, but at a small research lodge. This suited our needs just fine, and we were happy to be on an adventure.

We had to wait for night fall, so we checked out the AMAZING insect collection in the research room. The other USAC student who had gone with the three of us, Jakob, was signed up for an internship here, and the following weekend he got to stay and work on pinning insects to display in the case.

Costa Rica has no shortage of interesting insects, and we kept finding interesting specimens without even trying!

Before it was time to look for the frogs, we did a short walk through the woods. The sun was just setting, so taking photos became a challenge. However, I couldn't resist getting a picture of this grasshopper. It was the very reminder of how strange and alien a creature can look, and how easy it is to pass these wonders of nature by without even knowing of its existence. 

When it was time to search for frogs, there were a few different ones that we might be able to find. There were glass frogs, green frogs, and red-eyed tree frogs.

Roy was an expert at this, and found almost all of the frogs. Jakob managed to find one, and one of our Tico Friends found a frog, and I was very proud of myself for finding three. Other than that, no one else found any.

This guy is a glass frog. They liked to hide under these huge leaves, and they blend in very well. They were not very easy to find!

The famous red-eyed tree frog! He was far from me, so it was kind of hard to get a good picture.

This is the same frog as the picture above. I managed to get closer, but now he won't look at us. 

Another red-eyed tree frog, this was just a little guy. 

This was one of the frogs I found. I think this was another glass frog

This was another frog I found! I wish I remembered what kind it was. 

The glass frogs especially were captured and brought to the research room to be identified. This took hours, because there are a lot of species, and most of them look very, very similar. To those not familiar with identifying something to species, it's very time consuming, and involves looking at every last detail of the species in question.

We also found a caracolera, a snail eating snake. It was harmless, so we were allowed to hold it!

 We ended up going to bed around 2am, with almost all of the frogs identified. I think Roy felt bad for us, and let us go sleep. However, before bed, I had to get rid of THIS GUY from the room.

(Roy might have come to my rescue. He used his bare hands..yeck!)

The next day, we woke up with some time to kill before the bus ride home, so we went off and checked out more of the grounds. With the clouds gone, we could see an amazing view, and there were more animals for us to discover!

The chapel

We saw a small family of Coati wandering around the grounds. They look like weird raccoons. They didn't seem too bothered by people watching them, they just walked by with their tails in the air (they just didn't care!)

We also found this gorgeous butterfly, which was kind enough to stay still for us.

I have a setting on my camera to only pick up certain colors, so I picked the "blue" setting and tried it out. This is how it came out:

In front of the research room there was some nice paintings. We commemorated our great weekend by taking a photo interacting with the frog in the mural.

Annie Catches the frog

I mimic the frog

Manda kisses the frog

We found this weevil while on our walk. It seemed very curious about my camera.

Here is another kind of weevil. So cute!

A leaf-legged bug

Another leaf-legged bug

Some neat fungus

We had an amazing weekend at Villa Blanca, and I would love to go back to the hotel someday. For a vacation area, I would recommend it, it seems to have some great tours available and the hotel really cares about the environment. I only spent a night there, but I'll remember it for a lifetime.