Living conditions, first day

So this place is completely beautiful. It's located  right by a town called Bagaces but it really is in the middle of the jungle. Since this is still the tail end of the rainy season it's really mainly overgrown canopy.

       

mangos

bananas

giant mange-touts

 There are 2 buildings where we live. The first is the house, called Casa Piscina, which has the kitchen and big dinner table, and is basically the base.

no base is complete without minimalist Halloween decorations

                                      

It's also where the pets are kept

dogs

cat

hawk

The second building is the bodega, essentially a huge tarp roof with a couple of buildings attached. Most of us sleep in tents under this thing, and we have a bathroom and a couple of storage rooms as well. We have to share the space with a bunch of random junk, but we have lots of room and I am confident I will eventually be able to build a small aircraft out of these spare parts if I could only find a few more rubber bands and some chewing gum.

 

This is where I live. I've got a contractor coming over to talk
about knocking through the right side of tent to join up with
the trailer. I might get a waterbed.

It's actually really luxurious here. We have drinkable tap water, internet, decent kitchen and a washing machine. It's not even too unbearable hot in the shade. The howler monkeys wake you up in the morning but you need to be getting up anyway so they're totally my bros for making me not miss breakfast.

So far I've been out in the field once and didn't take my camera, so no monkey photos for you today. I get 1 day off for every 2 days in the field, and even though I have chores they re done pretty quickly so I have time to do other stuff, but the days in the field are exhausting. It's basically 15 hours of full on crashing through the jungle trying to keep up with the monkeys, craning your neck when they get high, and takes lot of mental concentration as well as you try and ID the monkeys and keep up with what they're doing. So far I've been bitten by numerous insects and arachnids, pooed on by a monkey, scratched by rash-raising plants and it's wonderful and I want to stay here lots and do it loads more.