Absolutely the prizewinners in the category of Towel and Toilet-Paper Art, these were waiting for us when we returned from our strenuous but extremely enjoyable Christmas Day excursion. Click the picture for a slightly larger version, or here in the text for a full view of the upper or the lower image.

Seventh day of the tour, Thursday, December 25

Christmas Day! —definitely the most strenuous hike of the tour, but not so interesting from a photographic standpoint. So, not so many pictures today, but lots of talk.

We got to breakfast early, in the hopes of seeing more birds, but not many appeared. After our meal, we climbed onto our bus at eight for a trip to the trailhead of a walk to the Biagua Falls. The walk would be a bit shorter than Thursday’s, but much more strenuous, with lots of up-and-downs, before we reached the descent to the falls themselves.

This really was a demanding walk, and I didn’t want to have to pay attention to a camera swinging around my neck when my full attention should be at my feet and the point of my walking stick, and where they were to be placed. But as I was walking down, I did get a few shots after pulling my camera out of the pack. Like the one at the left (big image, small), where, through the gap in the forest foliage, you can see the falls with its diagonal drop.

It was pretty steep going down—and don’t forget that we had had lots of hills and dales before we got to the trail that led directly down to the falls. I think all of us must have been giving thought to the return trip, up this steep path, which would have to be followed by the fairly long walk back to the bus. Be that as it may, you can see what the trail was like in the upper picture to the right (big image, small). In the lower picture to the right (big image, small), Mark is pausing at a considerably less steep part of the trail downwards.

But we did get down to the falls—it’s not the kind where you can see the whole cataract, but we were about halfway between the top and the bottom. And it doesn’t fall straight down anywhere, either. There Leo is, admiring it over at the left, and you can see a slightly bigger image or the full-sized one as well. Once we got down to the falls, we sat and rested, and I took any number of unimaginative pictures of water flowing past us. I estimate that only the picture of Leo to the left is of any interst.

The walk up was tough, but for some reason the steep-stepped path out of the chasm of the falls did not seem to strain me in any way. The down-and-ups on the route back to the bus were hard, but not as hard as they seemed on the way in. Mark, on the other hand, was heavily exhausted by the return trip. He said later that he got wetter—from sweat— than he had while walking in the wettest weather. Both of us complained later about our ankles and knees, however.

The part of the terrain nearest the place where the bus let us out was thoughly ugly, in my opinion. It’s a plantation for Teak and another South-East Asian tree called Melina. The teak is harvested for flooring, and the Melina seems to be used mostly for pulp. But neither tree leafed out fully here, and the dead leaves on the ground, especially the teak’s, were very ugly: big, pure black, and very crackly.

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After resting a bit up top, we climbed aboard the bus and rode to the house of Sergio’s mother-in-law Doña Vera, who fed us a meal—on Christmas Day!—of regular Costa Rican food. There were tamales of course, and I’m afraid they were much more to my taste than those of Doña Míriam the day before. These had chicken and chick peas, and, if I recall, rice, in them, and though a tamal is not my idea of something I would go out of my way for, they were very nice. But they were hardly the highlight of the meal. There were the superb plátanos that we had come to expect in Costa Rica, a nice plain chicken and rice dish (colored with annatto, of course), a couple of vegetable dishes, one with finely cross-sliced green beans, and also a traditional Costa Rican dish called Russian Salad, of potatoes and beets. There was a terrific thick juice drink made from carambola (star fruit) as well, which Mark quaffed and gobbled by the glassfull. Finally, homemade ice cream made of Costa Rican guavas, evaporated milk, and condensed milk. Very rich and very unusual in its tastiness. Coffee of course.

Then, back to Villa Caletas, where we showered and napped. This is when we found the towels twisted into the most fantastic form of all: Mark was sure that they were anteaters, but because of the big floppy ears, I declared them to be elephants.

We went to the bar around 5:30, in preparation for our 8:00 supper. You see Mark over to the left, writing up the day’s events. (Big image, small.) Naturally we were the first ones to have shown up for pre-dinner drinks, but the others filtered in and sat with us, as you see in the first five pictures below. Our farewell dinner was rather formal and elegant, under the stars. The one group picture I took at the dinner table is the sixth in the block below. Even though the portions were for the most part not huge, still I felt somewhat overfed when we left. But it was a fine capstone to a wonderful trip.

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