Eric Holscher

Thoughts on the Camino de Costa Rica

2025-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

My wife Meredith and I, along with two friends, just finished doing the Camino de Costa Rica. The standard way of doing it is with a guide, but we did it independently, heavily relying on Meredith’s conversational Spanish skills and extensive travel experience in Latin America.

Over a hike of 165 miles (~265 km), we climbed and descended over 30,000 feet (10,000 m) of elevation in 14 days, with some days having over 4,000 ft (1,200 m) of gain or loss. We ranged from the oppressive Caribbean coastal plain to chilly cloud forests at over 7,000 ft. Costa Rica is a varied and steep country!

Sunset over the Pacific Ocean, at the end of the trail.

Highlights

Overall, it was an amazing experience, with the highlights being the authentic connection with locals and the abundant wildlife.

If you want to see more photos of our trip, check out the Instagram posts that I made.

The people

Most nights we were hosted by local Ticos, with a range of accommodations from their own guest rooms to guest cabins specifically for hikers. They made us dinner and breakfast, and shared so much about the culture, history, and diversity of the country with us. We took a group photo with most of our hosts, and they have a WhatsApp group text where they share progress on our hike with our previous and future hosts. It felt like we had a lovely group of humans watching out for us each night of our hike.

Having my wife speak conversational Spanish was really helpful. I’d say about two-thirds of our hosts spoke primarily in Spanish, with only very basic English. Being able to chat with them, talk about our day on the trail, and hear about their lives made the trip much richer.

The wildlife

The other major highlight was definitely the wildlife. We saw many of the classic Costa Rican animals, like sloths and toucans. The number of birds we saw each day was also a treat. As we went from sea level to 7,000 ft and back to sea level, it was fun to see the climate change from tropical to cloud forest and back again, with the corresponding change in wildlife.

The forests and plants are also varied and beautiful across the whole country. Each day, you see amazing tropical flowers in bloom and pass lovely houses with great landscaping to enjoy. You walk through deep jungle with vines everywhere, but also banana, palm, and coffee farms. Each day, I’d look around and marvel at the feeling of being in a very different place than Oregon. :)

Downsides

The main downsides were constraints based on the topography and the early stage of the trail. You walk mostly on roads, usually on the only viable right of way over mountains or through river valleys. And the trails you do hike on tend to be muddy and steep.

Road walking

The biggest downside is definitely the road walking. In terms of the style of roads, I’d say:

0.25% of the trail is on busy roads with minimal shoulder. This only happened a couple of times, and usually only for 3-5 minutes at a time. Not great, but overall the only really scary part.
10% of the trail is on busy roads, but with a trail or large shoulder to stay safely away from cars.
25% is on somewhat busy roads (e.g., at least one car a minute), generally without a shoulder, but rarely with oncoming traffic so people can pass safely.
50% is on “roads,” which are barely roads. Many of these we didn’t see a car at all, and I’d question if it would even be possible for cars to drive on some of them.
15% or so is on trails (with the Palo Verde detour).

We hiked during Semana Santa (Holy Week around Easter), so we might have had more traffic than usual on some days. But overall, the traffic is definitely the biggest downside.

Weather and mud

The other downside we had was the weather. It was really, really hot and humid on the coasts. I don’t think I’ve ever sweat as much as I did on a couple of days hiking up steep hills in the humid sunshine.

Often when we were on trails, they were incredibly muddy. We got a couple of days of all-day rain, which also happened around our trail days, so I think we got worse mud than normal. Overall, we got some amount of rain most days, but sometimes just in the evenings or a few minutes in the afternoon.

I started singing a song called “everything I own is damp,” to give you an idea. :) We got to do laundry a few times along the way, but it was definitely on the wetter side for people used to hiking in the desert!

Recommendations

A few high-level recommendations based on having done the trail:

Don’t skip the canal section at the start – it was one of our highlights. It’s like a boat wildlife safari, and you see lots of animals.
Also, don’t skip the zero day for rafting. It was a really fun way to spend the day and take a break from hiking after the previous two hard stages.
Take the Palo Verde alternate – it cost us $6, but it was a nice trail and the ranger at the station was lovely. Lots of hummingbirds, and we heard quetzals!
Bring plenty of cash, which is easy to get at the airport. Most of the guest houses and restaurants only take cash. There are only a couple of ATMs along the way, and they don’t always work. We used the one in La Suiza.
Orosi Lodge was a really nice break in the middle with a nice bakery and pizza. We wished we’d taken a zero day here to explore Tapanti National Park and hit the hot springs and swimming holes nearby. If you have time, it’s nice to have a break in the middle.
Bugs were only notably bad on the coasts, and not terrible. Bring some bug spray, but we didn’t end up using a ton of it.
Don’t forget to make a Manuel Antonio park booking for once you land in Quepos, probably before the start of your trip. It was a lovely park with lots of wildlife and a beautiful beach. Though quite the shock to have so many tourists after two weeks of solitude.
I’d be less likely to recommend the trail if you don’t have at least a basic grasp of Spanish. Many of our hosts and most people we encountered didn’t speak much English – it was more enjoyable and kept us from making mistakes by being able to ask folks for help in Spanish.

Self-supported Camino De Costa Rica Gear list

All of our group has had significant thru-hiking experience on the Pacific Crest Trail, along with other American wilderness trails. The Camino is a very different beast – we didn’t have to carry much! I had a few questions about gear while doing a self-guided hike, since most of the info was about guided trips, so I’m sharing ours:

Primary gear

The primary gear was pretty lightweight overall, with clothes taking up the vast majority of space in my bags.

~30L day pack with hip belt
Pack cover
Dry bags for stuff inside pack (organization & you can never be too safe!)
Farout app (Important – amazingly useful for the hike)
Trekking poles (Important – it’s steep and can be muddy!)
Sun umbrella (Important – used for both sun and rain!)
Binoculars (Important – lots of wildlife!)
Warm fleece (Important – it gets cold!)
Lots of Colones (Important – most places only take cash, and there are few ATMs along the way)
2L water capacity
Water filter (the water in the mountains is delicious)
Headlight
Three sets of clothing (one worn, two packed – bring at least one pair of long pants and a sun shirt! Four total socks/underwear)
Rain coat (Didn’t use this because of the umbrella, so might swap with a lighter “wind coat”)
Toiletries
Phone, etc. chargers
Sit pads (small foam pads so you don’t have to sit on the ground)
Sandals (useful for river crossings and after taking your hiking shoes off)
Emergency food for one lunch, replenished when eaten (we ended up struggling to find lunch a couple of times)
Merlin app (for identifying birds)

Optional

Battery pack (I brought this, but was able to charge my phone and watch each night, so didn’t use it much)
A sleeping bag liner/sheet (I brought a sleeping bag liner and used it a few times when I wanted something light in warm climates, but definitely not required)
Air pillow (many beds only have one pillow, so this was more comfortable to have)

Things not to bring

A tent, unless you plan to camp
A stove
A sleeping bag
Food beyond snacks (there’s so much lovely food along the way and at the guest houses!)

Overall, it was a novel way to experience a country, by hiking across it in two weeks. The variety of environments and the connection with rural culture is hard to get any other way. If you’re ready for a challenging and rewarding two-week vacation, it’s definitely something I recommend.

Atop the Oregon Cascades, a University of Oregon team finds a huge buried aquifer

2025-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve always had a love for the massive spring-fed rivers in Oregon. I actually got married along the Metolius River, and have done many hikes along the Fall River and Mckenzie River. These rivers are always ice cold (~40F), and keep a consistent flow year round.

I recently heard about a University of Oregon team that did some additional research on the aquifer that feeds these rivers:

Scientists from the University of Oregon and their partners have mapped the amount of water stored beneath volcanic rocks at the crest of the central Oregon Cascades and found an aquifer many times larger than previously estimated — at least 81 cubic kilometers.

That’s almost three times the maximum capacity of Lake Mead, the currently overdrawn reservoir along the Colorado River that supplies water to California, Arizona and Nevada, and greater than half the volume of Lake Tahoe.

They used previous known quantities of the water outflow, and combined it with previous drilling for geothermal test wells in order to more accurately map the area and depth of the water. Normal ground gets hotter as you go down, but the area here stays the same temperature, which lets them understand how deep the water goes.

To better understand the flow of water through different volcanic zones, the team took advantage of projects begun in the 1980s and 90s. Past scientists had drilled deep into the ground and measured temperatures at different depths as part of the search for geothermal energy resources associated with the many hot springs that pepper the Cascades landscape.

Normally, rocks get hotter as you go deeper into the earth. But water percolating downward disrupts the temperature gradient, making rocks a kilometer deep the same temperature as rocks at the surface.

By analyzing where the temperature starts to pick up again in these deep drill holes, Karlstrom and his colleagues could infer how deeply groundwater was infiltrating through cracks in the volcanic rocks. That allowed them to map the volume of the aquifer.

Previous estimates of water availability in the Cascades took the springs at face value, measuring river and stream discharge. Instead, Karlstrom and his colleagues went deeper — literally. But since those holes weren’t originally drilled with the intent of mapping groundwater, they don’t cover every area where one might like to collect such data. So the new estimate of the size of the aquifer is a lower bound, and the actual volume might be even bigger still.

I also heard an interview with the researchers on a local outdoors podcast that I enjoy, and recommend listening.

A pattern for updating dependencies in a Docker image

2025-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

We use docker pretty heavily at work, and a pattern I’ve often run into is that I want to play around in a docker image to get something working, and then be able to “save” it back into the original image. This is generally a Python dependency or something similar that we’ve put into our requirements, but rebuilding all our dependencies takes a good bit of bandwidth and time.

Run a one off command and resave the image

To start you need to get a shell in your docker image

docker-compose exec $container /bin/bash

Then you can do whatever task you need to inside that shell

pip install requirements.txt

Then you need to save the image. You could pretty easily script this to pull the hash name from the ps output, but doing it manually only takes a couple seconds.

docker ps
# Get hash
docker commit -p $hash $container

I use this pattern often when the command is pretty heavy and I don’t want to rerun the whole docker build process.

I don’t use this often enough to automate, but it would be pretty easy to do with a line of awk :)

Use Docker caching?

We have experimented with Docker caching, and it generally works pretty well. However you can definitely run into weird cases where it decides a part of the build early on has been updated, and that then requires downloading multiple GB of data again. I think of the pattern above as a way to do more explicit image updating via cache, without having to depend on any specific logic or file modified dates that might have changed in the process.

31 days of posts

2025-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

I decided to try and write a blog post each day in January, and have now been successful! I have been inspired by folks like Simon Willison, John Gruber, and Andy Baio. They are able to keep up a rate of sharing over time, at different levels of depth.

I started out trying to write long blog posts, but have been humbled by my ability to do that daily. I lowered my inspiration to a link blog, which is much more workable for a daily post. I read a ton of different stuff each day, so sharing my favorite things seems like an easy task. The hard part has been choosing what to write about, whether I want a “beat” around tech docs or AI, or want to post what is personally interesting to me.

I’m hoping to continue writing on an almost daily basis, but also want to give myself permission to not do it each day.

Nat Bullard’s deck on decarbonization

2025-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve always enjoyed this deck about the state of global decarbonization. It has lots of great high-level graphs and takeaways around the state of climate change.

He is also doing 2 parts of the Catalyst podcast, discussing some of the high-level takeaways. I thought the discussion on sulfur emissions from shipping and China’s emissions in that area were really interesting.

Society for Technical Communication (STC) shutting down

2025-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Today there was some sad news, which is that the STC is shutting down. They posted a note on their website and other social media channels:

Despite significant efforts over the past several years by the various Boards of Directors and STC leadership, financial liabilities coupled with falling membership numbers have created a situation where we are not able to offer the education, resources, and outreach that this membership expects and deserves. Various cost-cutting measures and attempts to generate revenue have not been sufficient, and our debt and operational expenses now outweigh our ongoing revenue.

— STC Board of Directors & STC Executive Director Tim Shaw

It also got picked up on Hacker News, which had the usual mix of valuable and… divisive comments. I ended up commenting to provide some additional context, which is probably useful to share on the blog:

I’ve been working in this space for a long time, where I’m one of the co-founders of Write the Docs – we focus more on software docs.

The view from the industry is basically that STC was a bit behind the times, and was slowly dwindling in terms of reach and value. They still had some active chapters, magazine, and academic journal that provided value for folks, but membership wasn’t as valuable as it had been.

They have been around a long time, and had a wider purview that WTD, focusing on many different types of technical writing. They had members in industries like Automotive, Engineering, and Aerospace, as well as Software.

The best way to think about them is something like the ACM in the software industry. They have been taken over by more current community approaches in various areas (eg. Pycon), but also still doing some more traditional stuff that adds value but isn’t as relevant to day-to-day practitioners.

— Eric Holscher

It’s definitely a sad day, and sows more confusion and worry in an industry that is already pretty stressed by AI. I wish the STC folks the best of luck trying to shut down the organization, and I hope that Write the Docs can continue to carry the torch in some fashion.

Adam Jacobs on open source business

2025-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been listening to Adam Jacobs on Twitter for many years wax poetic about open source business. He finally put all his thoughts together in this video, which is a great overview of free software, open source, fair source, and how to build sustainable business.

Two good Deepseek explainers

2025-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

The day has been busy with folks talking about Deepseek and it’s R1 model. I found a couple posts really useful to understand and contexutalize it:

The Short Case for Nvidia Stock - published on Saturday January 25 by Jeffrey Emanuel. It’s a long post (~60m read time) that goes through the whole context of R1 in great depth, but very readable with a bit of technical knowledge
DeepSeek FAQ - published today by Ben Thompson, which tries to cover the high level takeaways and provide context for the market reaction today which was quite large.

Staying in Europe (Schengen) longer than 90 days as an American

2025-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

When we traveled previously in 2018-2019, we spent summer in Europe both times. In general you are allowed to spend 90 of any 180 days in the Schengen visa area. This is a huge part of Europe, and was always a rush against the clock because we’d love to spend more time in Europe.

I’ve found a way as an American to spend more time in Europe than 90 days, which are bilateral visa waiver agreements, which is basically an agreement that came into effect between the USA and a Schengen country before the treaty was signed.

USA Bilateral Agreement countries in the EU

I found this information in this reddit post, which covers a lot of the background:

Certain Schengen countries have the Bilateral Agreement law, which allows you to legally stay there for additional 90 days on top of the 90 days you spend in the Schegnen area. There are many EU countries that have this law but the problem is that most don’t actually seem to honor the law because it’s so old. There’s been more online discussion on it now with Reddit, but the common knowledge seems to be based off of my guide, which concluded that it’s only actually possible for Denmark and Poland.

You can find the official EU publication on this topic, which should be all that you need to show to initiate the 90 additional days, and hopefully on departure as well. It seems like you can’t leave the country that you have the extra 90 days during that time, but it includes some countries I wouldn’t mind spending a lot of time in like Italy:

Belgium - 3 months

Denmark - 3 months

Spain - 90 days

France - 90 days

Italy - 3 months

Latvia - 90 days in any half-year period

Hungary - 90 days

The Netherlands - 90 days

Norway - 90 days

Portugal - 60 days

This is an exiting new piece of information that I wish I’d had back in 2019!

The easiest way to find an AWS instance

2025-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

For some reason AWS makes browsing their instance types surprisingly hard. I’ve found Vantage’s instance viewer the best way to figure out the best option.