In
1995 and 1996 I took advantage of living in Costa Rica and made several
trips
to neighboring countries. In April 1995
I visited western Panama, and collected spiders near Caldera, a small
village
near Boquete. Then I flew over the mountains to the Caribbean side and
visited
Bocas del Toro Island. Three months later, in July 1995 I made a trip into Nicaragua, visited Rivas, Lago Nicaragua, Matagalpa and the beautiful Selva Negra forest. |
In September and October 1996 I made a longer trip to Guatemala, Honduras, and again Nicaragua. Like on the previous trips, I mostly used local busses, and thus spent more than 80 hours in these unforgettable vehicles, usually overloaded with people and goods destined for the market or brought from there, street-vendors selling drinks, sweets, and bakeries at the numerous stops, men of god trying to preach louder than the music and the traffic’s noise and fitting their sermon exactly between two stops, aching backs and bottoms, sweat and bumpy streets, good talks with people I never met before and will never meet again. . |
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My first
collecting site was famous Panajachel at Lake Atitlan; next I moved on
to the gorgeous
hot springs at Fuentes Georginas near Zunil, and flew over to Peten and
visited the
impressive pyramids at Tikal. On the way back to the capital I stopped
at Finca
Ixobel near Poptun, a place so close to Eden I would have wished to
just stay
there. |
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