Summer in San Francisco is a rarity and usually involves quotation marks. It's a far cry from summer in Iowa, which is a freaking reward for making it through the winter.

Maybe it's just me, but there's sort of an air of desperation to the floaty skirts and sandals I see out on the street here. Days where you can comfortably wear a single layer of cotton are sporadic and scattered, and I almost want to pull aside the summerishly clad girls and say, "You know, it doesn't have to be this way. There are places where you can reasonably own multiple sundresses, because there are multiple months in which you can wear them."

We went for a mini-hike in Tilden on Sunday and found Tilden Little Farm, where I learned that sheep have wool and goats have hair.
Also, sheep tails go down and goat tails go up!

We spent one night in Dominical, a dirty little surfer town about twenty miles - or a hard hour of driving on a laughable mockery of a road - down the coast from Manuel Antonio. In retrospect, this was a bad idea and we wouldn't recommend it, mainly because there's not much to do in Dominical unless you're an experienced surfer (the swells were eight feet high when we were there), but also because our hotel's septic system/dung well was being cleaned out:

Hotel Domilocos, for those who are interested, gave no mention of this splendid display of engineering when we booked our room there.

The road down was surrounded by African oil palm fields, which had originally been for banana crops until the blight in the 1980's.

See, I know it's pretty (this is Playa Ballena), but I just can't get as excited about this as a monkey.

The main "drag" in Dominical, on which they sold crap made in China or Taiwan that had nothing to do with Costa Rica (the country was home to only a few loosely organized tribes when it was first discovered/invaded by Spanish explorers, and there aren't many authentic local crafts to be found).

Playa Uvita after a sunset - no green flash in sight.

Despite being Costa Rica's smallest national park, Manuel Antonio is the second most visited. The perfectly nice beaches probably have something to do with it, but the main attraction is the wildlife.

We hadn't been at our hotel five minutes before a horde of squirrel monkeys careened over our room and proceeded to the pool for a drink.

OMG TWO-HEADED MONKEY!

And here I am badgering an iguana.

Basilisks are also called Jesus Christ lizards because they can "run" on water.

Playa Espadilla was the free beach right before the national park and quite nice, except for that whole sun-giving-you-cancer-while-your-flipflops-kick-up-sand-onto-your-sunscreen-and-sweat-slicked-calves thing.

Capuchin monkeys, also called white-face monkeys, are the ones they tell you to watch your stuff around; this guy played an integral role in a plastic bag heist that went down later that afternoon.

By the time we'd been in Manuel Antonio for twenty-four hours, the afterglow of my ocelot encounter was starting to fade just a little and I was ready for a new furry diversion. Luckily - though not surprisingly - Steve had struck up a conversation with a woman by the pool who mentioned that the hotel's restaurant was surrounded by trees that were home to a couple three-toed sloths.

You know how your cat or dog's fur grows downward, towards its paws? Sloths are the only mammal that has UPWARD growing fur, because they spend so much time upside down.

They're almost completely arboreal (they come down to poop) and their diet of mostly leaves and buds led to the evolution of multiple stomachs and a digestion period that can be up to a month.

A mama and baby sloth combo is pretty darn close to tactile ocelot contact, you have to admit.

We spent the second and third nights of our trip near Arenal Volcano, which is the third most active volcano in the world (how they determine this, I have no clue); you actually have a better chance of seeing lava/house-sized rocks spewing forth from the crater at the top during rainy season because the torrential downpours remove moisture and thus clouds from the air. Of course, we were there in the heart of dry season.

This is a coatimundi, another member of the raccoon family. They're called pizotes in Costa Rica. They're hella cute.

They're social animals and pretty much flourish in the face of urban development; right outside the frame here is a woman in a car unwrapping some sort of delicacy from a plastic wrapper and rolling down her window.

The oropendola makes sweet nests like this.

We heard that Arenal Observatory Lodge was the best place to try and see lava, so we had breakfast there and went on a few mini-hikes while waiting for firey volcano action. On our way back on the waterfall hike, Steve talked to a couple who'd seen an ocelot back on the trail who apparently would walk along side you and purr and hiss. I was disbelieving until a second couple confirmed this.*

So there I was, stealthily charging down the trail with the SLR and the 12x zoom around my neck like some sort of demented German tourist, when I see a little spotted jungle kitty on the side of the path. Knowing that he was somewhat friendly and probably wouldn't run away, I scrambled up the embankment and got as close to him as I could, just as it was starting to pour. He sat petulantly under some leaves until he somehow confirmed that I was a big happy Goretex tent of dryness and warmness and then:

BOOYEAH OCELOT.

Or margay. Extensive internet research has left me conflicted about the species that's crawling up onto my lap here, but I'm going with ocelot for two reasons: a) it's the more common and less arboreal of the two and b) no one knows what the heck a margay is.

After this he wound his way around my side, then to my back just above my pack under the raincoat, and then finally up to my neck like a little furry jockey. Steve didn't know what had happened until I hobbled over to him, be-camera-ed and be-jungle-catted, and said voce sotto, "He's ON MY SHOULDERS." Steve thought I was talking about the rain until he lifted the hood up and saw two faces and four eyes. Then he jumped back about five feet, which pissed off the ocelot and made him growl a little, sort of a cross between a cat and a dog: "Rewh-rewh."

At this point I started reconsidering the prudence of having what to all intents and purposes was a feral animal next to my head, complete with teeth and claws that harbored bacteria that hadn't even been discovered yet. I crouched down to let him dismount, but he seemed rather certain that there was still something to be gained from proximity to us.

In this picture I'm about five seconds away from fashioning a little harness and leash from vines and smuggling him back into the United States in a cast made of cocaine.

The evidence that eradicates any street cred that messing with an ocelot might earn me: he's not even scared of flash. He's just like, "DUDE. Put it away."

Oh, look, a pretty suspension bridge. Wait, you want more pictures of the ocelot? Really?
You mean you don't want to see two thirds of an active volcano, specifically the two thirds that don't spew lava or make noise?

Aww, tumbuddy's tirsty.

*Costa Rica is the patron country of coupledom, as far as we can tell; I don't know if either it doesn't allow single travelers off the plane or whether it does and then matches them up at customs or what, but everybody's got someone down there.