Happy Holidays from the Tropics

Love to you all. Please forgive me the spell check doesn't work on my comp or blogger! Oh and my ghost writer is in Italy! Thanks for reading and all the support! We love and miss you all- especially the followers...really special friends. Editing continues... 2010 will be a great year!

Orchid Hunting

Truly an amazing day. We left early with Nicho, Limon's 70 yr old uncle and went walking. We walked for 8 hrs and saw more of Volcan than most have seen, I'm sure. Nicho took us to the laguna and the bigger lake and we crossed many rivers and herds of cattle (ganado). He has an incredible eye and would pick out orchids from across the meadow, or 30 ft up in a very obscure location. He taught us the technique- he would use his machete to chop a perfect v out of a stick and proceed to carefully rock the orchid back and forth until it came to him- the "orchid whisperer".

We found the vampiro (vampire) it looks almost like a necklace, and an orange hanging orchid with tiny flowers, a large yellow one that almost looks edible, and I actually impressed our guide finding a very rare red with yellow and a small peat moss-looking variety with the smallest flowers of all! Nicho said he'd never encountered it! He participates in the annual Fiesta de Flores in Boquete and said we would probably win for rarity and might even have discovered a new orchid! We'll see in January- just have to keep them alive until then which is not easy! We also saw two more varieties of limon- limon dolce is like a water orange- crunchy not much flavor. Our favorite hands down is Persa, its big, very limey with a hint of sweetness, lots of juice, but sadly as it is a hybrid no seeds.

Creole and madarin with orange flesh, very sweet are close seconds and we have quite of few of these types growing.

Nicho says in December there are a few weekends when everyone goes down and camps around the lake and it's very safe and tranquil. We're going to go soon so we miss the crowds. We heard the coffee farm near there, instead of killing the snakes with chemicals, rounded them all up and released them at the laguna, although we didn't even see on snake, now we're going to be very cautious.

You can fish- there's trout (trucha) and carp and a few others. There's also coffee and tons of fruits- delicious oranges. It really opened my eyes up to how wonderful Volcan is. It's a veritable playground.

Lakes and rivers and water holes, even hotsprings for swimming, mountains for hiking and foraging, long routes for biking and exploring, EVERY PLANT YOU CAN IMAGINE to use for cultivation, even the beach is only a few hours away.