Today we repacked our bags, caught a taxi to the Turrialba bus station and boarded a local bus to the mountain town of Turrialba. There we dropped our stuff off at a modest hotel and caught another cab to the Guayabo archeological site. The site was once home to about 700 priestly inhabitants, with several thousand more people living in the vicinity. What remains of the site are walkways, mounds (one which contains funerary remains and jade pieces), an aqueduct and water storage cisterns. The site was abandoned around 1400, probably as a result of intertribal wars in that there is also much ash which seems to imply the whole village must have been burned down by it's conquerors.
The park site is embedded in a rainforest, replete with gorgeous tropical flowers including white ginger and startlingly bright pinks, oranges and yellows. Beyond this are the gorgeous birds and magnetic butterflies.
We arrived around a bit after three in the afternoon, just as the park was about to close. Rather than being tight-assed functionaries, the rangers decided to keep it open so we might visit (especially in that we had travelled so far to get there.) We were assigned a sweet "by-donation" guide who dedicated the next several hours to showing us around. The whole visit was decidedly low-key relative to my visits to archeological sites in Peru and Mexico. There thousands of tourists flock to absorb remnants of ancient history, while here there were perhaps two other groups taking it all in.
Tomorrow, Dennis and I go white water rafting, while Linda explores a pineapple plantation...
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