charliedoggett.net
Good morning Costa Rica! It’s another beautiful day! Here’s today’s sunrise from the beach at Hotel Banana Azul, Puerto Viejo, Caribe Sur. And if you like photos of sunrises and sunsets, check out my gallery: Vistas and while I post I’m watching a Gray-cowled Woodrail build a nest just below my terrace. Cool!
“Good morning . . . It will smile at you if you smile at it”
¡Pura Vida!
It is called Finca la Isla Permaculture Farm and Botanical Gardens. It reminded me of the old hippie organic gardening farms we had a few of across the states. Though they were picking fruit for tomorrow morning’s Farmers’ Market, they obviously aren’t making much money at farming or with tourist visits. The only other visitor there this morning was a really nice Indian Doctor/Surgeon from Trinidad who drove me to my hotel after our visit and snack of fresh fruits. He grows tropical fruits in Trinidad as a hobby and was collecting seeds from Costa Rica. Interesting! I continue to have such serendipity people experiences like him and the French family at the Sloth Sanctuary yesterday! It’s a small world in Costa Rica! 🙂
The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.
— Alfred Austin
!Pura Vida!
That is the title of the latest book I am reading To Bless the Space Between Us by John Donohue, which is a book of Celtic Blessings. With this collection of blessings and his discussion I see how anyone can be a blessing to me and how I in turn can bless anyone. 🙂
It might be summed up in 3 lines from his printed “House Blessing:”
“May you have the eyes to see
That no visitor arrives without a gift
And no guest leaves without a blessing.”
~John Donohue
And thus I leave in the morning to the airport with my driver Cristian who’s positive spirit always blesses me and I end up later in the morning at one of the most welcoming and relaxing of all hotels in Costa Rica, Hotel Banana Azul, Puerto Viejo.
After a delicious breakfast on their patio watching birds, I will walk down the beach to central Puerto Viejo (I always arrive too early for my room to be ready, so I leave my bags and do my first photo-walk). 🙂 Yes, this is an annual pilgrimage for me – always full of blessings!
In this quaint little Caribbean town I will walk, greet people, and discover new beauty every few meters, to behold and photograph both as art and pura vida people blessing me! I hope in my first walk to find focus on this year’s set of Caribe photos and the photo book to follow, as I record the beauty of the “graciousness of the destination,” inspired by another John Donohue quote shared last week:
“When the destination becomes gracious, the journey becomes an adventure of beauty.”
-John O’Donohue
May I accept each of their blessings and may I bless them!
Join me on my journey as I blog blessings daily from Puerto Viejo.
¡Pura Vida!
For the butterfly lovers who have visited my photo gallery of butterflies, you may have found it “busy” or confusing or difficult to navigate through and find specific butterflies. I have now fixed that. I have wanted to add multiple shots of the same species and did some but that made for more photos to wade through. It was 205 photos and growing! Difficult!
NOW I have a separate gallery or sub gallery for each species all grouped together in a “folder” gallery for all butterflies. The above feature photo is the first page of the alphabetically arranged butterflies. You can more easily skim through the 76 sub galleries and open only the one you are looking for. It will make my butterfly gallery useful to people wanting to ID a butterfly in Costa Rica or just find a photo of a particular butterfly. I’ve seen other Costa Rica butterfly galleries by hobbyist like me and personally think mine is the best! 🙂
https://charliedoggett.smugmug.com/OTHER-WILDLIFE/Butterflies-Moths
This means that a lot of links in my blog posts will be to the old gallery which I am temporarily leaving up. I hope to tackle the big job of going through all references to the old gallery and change the link! Whew! Not a global fix for that!
The little trip to the beach gave me some different birds than the many toucans & macaws around the hotel, plus I saw a new type of Euphonia today in a tree off my room terrace, just not a good photo, but a “lifer” for me! (First time to see that species.) Only 6 birds but interesting ones:
CLICK image to enlarge.
Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
~Rabindranath Tagore
¡Pura Vida!
Nature is what we see – the hill, the afternoon, squirrel, eclipse, the bumblebee. Nay, nature is heaven. Nature is what we hear…
~Emily Dickinson
Above is this morning’s photo of a Variegated Squirrel at Xandari Nature Resort (link to their website) or see my photos of last year’s visit here.
¡Pura Vida!
Monday morning Walter will drive me to Xandari Nature Resort, just about an hour away, north of our Provincial Capital, Alajuela (location of San Jose Airport) for my second visit to a very “arty” nature reserve, farm and hotel made the way I think Frank Lloyd Wright would have designed it! And every room and garden is filled with art!
The gardens, nature trails (many birds) and 5 waterfalls are fabulous as are all the meals and the Spa where you can have a private Jacuzzi overlooking the Central Valley, as will my room! Though I will be hiking and birding every morning, this is more of a relaxation retreat than some of my trips and I might even get a relaxation massage! 🙂
I was there last July: 2018-July-14-18–Xandari Nature Resort (photos)
I made a photo book on that trip too: Xandari: Enchanted by Nature with the book cover my featured photo at top today. 🙂
I do believe that I have the best possible retirement that anyone could have! 🙂 And I’m guaranteed a Happy Birthday too! 🙂
My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.
~Claude Monet
¡Pura Vida!
Mine was so surrounded by forest on top of a hill that I could not get a distance shot of it, thus the featured photo is of another cabin, #9, not quite as big as mine (#12) since mine had a kitchen which I did not need but used like an office for my computer & camera stuff. I guess the kitchen is good for families.
I sat on the porch every day with my camera but did not photograph many birds there, just a dove, kiskadee, clay-colored thrush and one little lizard with a dewlap. But a nice peaceful place!
The electricity is from solar-powered batteries (a bunch of batteries!). The “hot” water was a separate device with a long pipe running back and forth on a board out in the sun. Since it is rainy season and limited sun I barely had warmish water after letting it run for three minutes. Showering first thing in the morning means a cold shower. Ahhh nature! 🙂
These “eco” lodges all encourage you to reuse your towel, hanging it on the towel rack for multiple uses all for ecology (but even more to save on their laundry costs!). The problem is that in a coastal rainforest like the one I was in, It is very hot 24-7 with humidity in the 90 percentiles, thus hanging towels never get dry (unless in direct sunlight). A wet towel will not dry you! I was not very ecological! 🙂
Click an image to enlarge it.
Yes, you have to walk up a trail to your cabin, uphill! But they have strong young men on staff to carry your luggage up! A part of the remoteness!
There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea.
~Gustav Stickley
I’m starting a “Trip Gallery” on my visit to Macaw Lodge, but it may be a week before finished. It is titled: 2019-06–18-24–Macaw Lodge
¡Pura Vida!
In these last 2 or 3 days I’ve seen a lot of the same birds but also got 5 new species shown here plus I’m adding the juvenile of the kingfisher and a new shot of a Muscovy Duck in the rain that I really like which is different from the Mom and babies I shared earlier. Enjoy!
Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
¡Pura vida!
On my waterfall hike the other day I photographed a frog that was new to me. Lisa here at the lodge helped identify it at a Brilliant Forest Frog or Lithobates warszewitschii which is among the 194 species of frogs here in Costa Rica. The link to frog name is to Wikipedia but more research has info on: (1) IUCN Red List, (2) Amphibiaweb, (3) CRBio, and many more!
The first photo below is of the back of the frog made on my cell phone and the other, a side view, with my Canon. To avoid scaring him away, both had to be shot from a distance in little forest light,f thus had to be cropped a lot, so not very good shots, but you can see what he basically looks like and online you will see some varieties of colors, etc.
See also my Costa Rica Amphibians Photo Gallery for more than 20 species I have photograph and about that many more unidentified! 🙂
¡Pura Vida!