Monteverde

I am, obviously, extremely far behind, and will be covering the last two months in smaller installments, instead of trying to write (and make you read) one big one. Sorry for being a slacker, I'll try to get better.


So, the weekend after Jaco, Nov. 14-16, I made a last second decision to take advantage of my long weekend while I still had it and head out to Monteverde to see some cloud forest goodness. I packed my things Saturday night and woke up early to catch the bus in San Jose. There are two buses that run daily to Monteverde - one at 6:30am and another at 2:30pm. It's a 4 hour ride, so I got in at about 10:30 - plenty of time to wander around during the day and see some of what Monteverde is all about. SO worth it. I dropped my stuff, grabbed some food and headed off to La Selvatura park, where I spent hours (until almost sunset) wandering around their 8 hanging bridges. I opted out of doing the zipline canopy tour there - I figure I'll get that next time around, when I have someone to do it with - but loved getting to see some birds, flowers, a tarantula, and the raccoon of Costa Rica. I forget what it was called (coatil?), but it was funny looking.

When I got back I wandered over to the grocery store to grab some food for the rest of the trip and made some friends while I was cooking. I met two guys from California who were traveling from Honduras down to Panama, and who were on their way to Heredia after Monteverde and were potentially going to be in Bocas del Toro when I was thinking of doing my visa run. Turns out we got along real well and planned to meet up in Heredia and Bocas. Fairly uneventful aside from that, but it was a fun night.

I woke up early on Monday to catch the 6:15 bus over to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve entrance, where a group of us waited for the park to open. While waiting, I met a couple of guys who were going to be taking a birding tour. Inspired by them, when I bought my entrance ticket for the park, I signed up for a tour as well. It turned out to be a bit more expensive than I wanted, but it was well worth the money. Because I had a tourguide, I got to see a quetzal. Awesome. After the tour ended, I wandered around the park and ran into the two birders that I met in the morning. The three of us then wandered around the park together until it closed. It was nice to have some company, especially people who were good at spotting birds.

That night I decided to take the night tour my two California friends recommended. Everyone doing the tour piled into a big van and we promptly got in to an accident. Literally, we had just pulled away from the curb when the driver backed in to the van behind us. Ridiculous.
So, a half hour later, we finally got in to a different van and went on the night tour. It was pretty neat. I got to see a sloth, raccoon, snake, a mother tarantula and its babies, and a whole bunch of different kinds of insects. It was great.

All in all, Monteverde has been one of the cooler things I have done/seen since coming to this country. I highly recommend you all go there some time. I plan on going back. Though I have a few other stops to make first...