Reserva

Today we rented a motor scooter to travel up into the Talamanca Indigenous Reserve. We were unsure about the condition of the loop road we were going to take because of the recent rains, but figured we could always turn back if it got impassable. We went through the town of Bribri and looped through Bratsi, Suretka, and Uatsi, but one really could not call those places towns—though they are actually marked on the map. After passing through Bribri, the road follows the Rio Yorkin valley. In the accompanying photo you can see the river in the distance. Bananas are among the trees in the foreground. These plantings on the reserve are not as dense and managed as those on industrial plantations.

At Suretka we took the right fork in the road away from the river, and climbed out of the valley. Rolf does this route on his mountain bike—that would kill me! We saw no wildlife. This may in part be because indigenous folks are allowed to hunt. Shar shot a lot of video with our little camera. I am linking the three clips in this entry to YouTube, because they will look better there than if I embed them here on this blog site. (John Gussman will tell me there are better sites for posting video, but these are definitely not high-def anyway.) There were a number of places where creeks were running across the road, & I was jokingly referring to them as "river crossings." It got to where Shar was wanting to get out before I attempted to slog through the gravel. As it turned out, I did not wreck the rental motorbike. Here's a clip of us approaching Uatsi. When we hit Uatsi we stopped at a little hut where a family sells indigenous crafts: jewelry, baskets, carved gourds. We'd been there in previous years--but never via that loop route--we'd always gone directly from Bribri before & turned around, a much shorter trip. The father made an effort to rig up a light bulb for us. I told him it was not necessary. They all spoke Bribri amongst themselves, but we did the buying in Spanish. After asking them if I was permitted to take photographs (very important), I shot a clip there.