Monteverde Cloud Forest

            Super early day this morning, whoo boy! Mom, Dad and I set our alarms for 4:30 and after dragging ourselves out of bed and getting everything packed, were up at Luke’s house by 5:30 to pick him and Arden up.  Then it was a three or so hour drive to our final destination for the day; Monteverde.  I remember going there once the last time we were in Costa Rica about 14 years ago (I was 7 at the time) and I remember it was a truly amazing place, and fun as well.  What I DON’T remember from that trip was the drive to Monteverde. Oh. My. Goodness.

            The first two hours were anything but extraordinary, fairly well paved roads, well marked road signs… the usual.  But the last hour… wow. I would say the roads were gravel, but this wasn’t just any gravel.  This was gigantor gravel, stone sized, some verging on boulders.  And then there were all the tight turns and the stretches that shot straight up or straight down. Oh, and then you had the combination of a hairpin turn WITH a straight up.  And this all the while you were clacking your teeth together for the consistent bumps and jolts.

            Some of you may know me as not the best passenger in the world as I tend to be a little on edge and overly jumpy sometimes while sitting in the side seat. Mind you, sometimes. It depends on the situation. Well, I can tell you I spent that whole hour on edge. I think Luke was actually quite entertained at my terrifiedness and I’m glad it at least made someone feel better. 

I’ve already made it quite evident that this little car is not the most gung ho, blazing its own trail, crazy driving type car.  It’s a great car for city driving and parking in tight spaces, that’s about it. That and great gas mileage. Just to give you a glimpse into my mind during that hour, here’s a bit of a picture ran through my head at one point;

From all the strain put on the poor car it finally decides it’s had enough and the transmission blows up, sending shards of metal into all four tires which then explode from the car, disintegrating into smithereens. This then causes the car to smash down onto its undercarriage which breaks off the exhaust pipe, cracking the oil pan and spewing oil all over the car.  The oil leakage than bursts into flames, igniting the entire car on fire, and we are left standing there in the middle of nowhere, with a baby, watching our blazing inferno of a car disintegrate into ash.

            That’s how bad the road was.

            Moving on from that lovely image… We got to Monteverde around 10:00, a little later than we had hoped but we still made good time. We had had some difficulty with directionality again once we got into a rather confusing town, and we learned that there was more than one place to do what we wanted to do.

No wonder we got lost...

Finally finding our way to the highly recommended Selvatura Park, we paid our entrance fee and got started on our day in the cloud forest! First was the several hour self guided tour of the Sky Walk which was a combination of about 8 suspension bridges that spanned the canopy of a good part of the forest as well as some well maintained foot paths.

Felix and I on one of the Sky Walks

 That was super cool! We got to see over the canopy of the forest as well as walk through parts of the forest and there were tons of butterflies and birds around.  I think we probably took twice as long as the estimated completion time since we like to stop every ten paces to take a picture, locate a calling bird, identify a strange fungus… Oh biologists J.

View of some of the forest canopy

We finished up with the Sky walk around 1:00 and made it just in time for the next tour of the butterfly sanctuary.  

The Butterfly Sanctuary 

We got to see a bunch of the native butterflies that they raised in this giant dome garden and they even had boards of the chrysalises that they collected in preparation for their hatching. A bunch of them were wiggling too!

The box of chrysalises 

One of the hundreds of butterflies

A recently hatched butterfly

After that tour, we made our way to the hummingbird garden where they had tons and tons of feeders set up and even more hummingbirds of various varieties buzzing and zipping around.  We sat in there for quite some time, Dad and I both content to sit and photograph and Arden completely enthralled by all the pretty, flashing birds.  

Female Violet Saberwing

At one point, this old and beat up looking Coati came ambling up out of the woods and walked about right around our feet looking for food and licking up the sugar water that had accumulated on the ground.  That was cool and it didn’t really seem to care that we were there.

We finally dragged ourselves away from the hummingbirds and left the park, driving a little ways into town to a café that was recommended to us as a good place to sit and watch birds.  We got some coffee and lunch and sat outside by the feeders to see what we could see.

We didn’t actually really see any birds, to our disappointment, so after a while we packed up again and headed down the road.  We took a short detour along the way to a park that we had spent a lot of time at the first time we were in Costa Rica, the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. It was cool to just walk around for nostalgias sake and some of my memories as a 7 year old started coming back.

As we were getting ready to leave Luke started cutting up some fruit for our drive home and we had this rather curious coati come within arms distance of us.  It was pretty funny to watch it stalk up as close as it possibly dared and then just whip around and dart off a ways.  It did that several times!

The drive back home was rather uneventful, though of course there was that horrendous excuse for a road that we had to travel back over.  Yeesh! By the time we got home we were all happy from a fun filled day and ready for a good nights sleep.