Puerto Viejo Weekend Part One

The trip to Puerto Viejo is describable only as unreal. Probably the most fun I have had on this trip and that is really not easy to say.
We started off the weekend in the morning by going to a public health care providing company and saw and heard just what goes on in the industry. They work on an all or nothing basis because they have to put their offers to the government in by a certain time and then if the offer is excepted they are stuck in a deal for 5 years if the government so chooses. It seems like a lose-lose but the company we saw seems to be doing really well. They have about 15 employees that do about 1.5 million a year in sales and they have very little inventory at their facility. I got the feeling that they sometimes do not even see the inventory they move because they are a middle man. We learned quite a bit from the lady giving us the presentation and it was not a bad way to spend some class time.
We came back to Veritas for lunch then it was off to La Selva research station. This was a biological research station in the middle of the forest that was right next to a national park. We took a guided hike when we got there and a guided hike in the morning. Some of us opted for the non guided night hike. There was nine of us I believe Chase, Morell, Nate, Stephanie, Evan, Heidi, Diane, Bob and myself. The point was to find a snake which we finally saw two or three days later but the night hike was really quite the experience. We were pretty much all terrified of finding a snake but we wanted to anyway…never happened. Although we did find a stick that looked pretty much exactly like a snake ready to strike hanging from a tree, Diane let us all know when she saw it, here scream probably scared off the rest of the animals. My tradition of having bats fly directly at my face continues as it has now happened three times. The best part of the hike was talking about the hostile natives that were hiding in the trees waiting to attack us, but the girls did not seem to like this topic of conversation. Also we were all viciously attacked by ants almost every minute of the hike.
The next morning we had breakfast and a hike then it was off to Chiquita. We learned how Chiquita is trying to help the environment in a special program they partake in, got a good lunch, then went to see some of their operations. We saw things such as cleaning, selecting, packaging, sorting, and the list goes on. It was really neat to watch the people work and they filled up two trucks of reject bananas virtually right in front of our eyes; apparently these go down the road to be made into things such as baby food. We saw a banana show that included dancing, a history, and loads of information about bananas. Then we thanked the people and it was off to Puerto Viejo.