If life gives you lemons, throw a tantrum and go to the mountains

Current location: Monteverde, Puntarenas, Costa Rica.

I never expected to reenact a five-year-old starved for attention by jumping up and down waving my arms to all directions while screaming “Hello, help!” in front of the head of a university department. Nevertheless, it seemed to have worked because my imitated tantrum finally made high-up people of the university aware of that things have not been working in the way they should have. By things I am referring to the absolute starvation of help and support for the project that we have received up until now. The perplexity of their logic so far has been as frustrating as astonishing. Or maybe there is no logic; maybe there is just laziness and apathy. Either way, we are expected to shit rainbows but are not given magic dust. We are supposedly in a hurry to find the nests, but we should not go until we have found them…but then again no one will find any nests unless we look for them. Does that mean that we should go look for them anyways? We are told not to go alone and not to contact the people who have the knowledge to go with us due to our low rank in the hierarchy chain, but we are given their phone numbers with an encouragement to call them. We should not drive in Costa Rica, but they cannot help us with transportation, so we should probably rent our own car or take the bus (with a boat and engine as luggage…). Wait, what? I am starting to get confused… What exactly is it that you want us to do, apart from making a miracle happen? After my little imitated tantrum every one seemed very keen about meeting with us, except for the person that should be helping us. She does not answer her phone. We had rented a car and were on our way out into the field, in spite of the recommendation to not go out alone, and to not contact people of SINAC. Our plan was simple: If they don’t answer phone calls or emails and cannot give us a time when they are available we’ll simply just go there and sit and wait until they pity us so much that they make something happen. This was met with disapproval from one of the thesis advisors who up until now have not been involved at all. But what were we supposed to do? Wait for a crocodile to lay eggs in our bathroom in the city? But now things seem to be happening, finally, after we have involved the head of the department. It is never fun having to point fingers at people who are not doing their jobs, but when it is my future and my degree at stake I will not hesitate. Something needed to be done, and judging from the all of a sudden extreme interest of having meetings with us we have stirred the pot pretty well. Due to all of the meetings we were delayed in our departure to the national park four hours. As the sun goes down pretty early here we soon realized that we wouldn’t make it to the park in time. We had already rented the car, so we decided to go up to the mountains of Monteverde instead. We had heard a lot about it. The view was indeed spectacular so the decision to make a detour was a good one, as was the call to stay in a hotel instead of a hostel. I fell asleep like a baby…