Costa Rica Page 3

Tuesday, June 20th 2006: I woke early to the noise from upstairs at 5:30am and went down to breakfast at 6:30am, ate and was back in the room at 7am to futz around the get my stuff together before an 8am departure. We have been groaning on this vacation that the days seem to start just *so* early, this vacation travel isn't for people who like leisurely vacations and people who like to have a lot of down time or get to sleep in. The days are extremely long, and they're absolutely packed with stuff so that you never have to do anything on your own. You get a few little 1 hour breaks here and there, but mainly those are just to take a breather or go back to your room, change clothes or get your camera, etc and you're off to the next thing. I'm not used to this and I'm not liking it much. I like to have my own itinerary, take my time seeing the things I want to see, and have a lot of down time. Not really this constant go-go-go to get it all packed in to the gills with crap, like dairy farms. I do love the emphasis of the outdoors and natural history on this particular trip, and the guide who is practically encyclopedic in his knowledge of both natural history and costa rica is actually really awesome, I just wish he'd shut up more and interject the facts less constantly. In the mean time, I'll be a whiny brat about how not tolerable the limitations are for me. So read on, people, read on. It only gets snarkier.

8am we left. We drove to the Monteverde forest to do the hanging gardens tour which was actually really cool. Monteverde, as I said, is in the "cloud forests" which means you're basically up in the canopy of the rainforest (where most of the life is) and it's actually pretty cool for a rainforest- still dense and lush, but cool and constantly covered with fog since it's above the cloud line. The tour was actually optional, but everybody did it. I was really expecting amazing things but it wasn't great for either birds or wildlife. Right away i got an amazing look at a blue naped chlorophonia male who sat still for me and was absolutely spectacular.

While we were looking, we heard the call of the elusive, gorgeous blue headed mot-mot, but I only spotted flash of him go by and nobody was able to actually see him again, but we hear him singing. To the left is the mot mot, and to the right is the clorophonia (neither are my images!). There was another 2-toed sloth we spotted in a tree with another little baby on its belly. As Marcos set up his Swarovski spotting scope, we all took turns looking at the sloth and got a glimpse of the little baby's face as it stuck its head outside of its mother's belly. I love those sloths, they are so sweet looking. The sloth is the slowest mammal, and is so slow that algae actually grows on its coat, giving it a greenish coloration. They are know for their very long nails, which help aid their grasp of the branches in the rainforest canopy. They really almost never come down out of the canopy, and have been known to even keep their grip on the branches even post-mortem. The sloth sleeps from 15-20 hours a day and at night tends to feed on shoots and leaves, again moving very, very slowly. Young sloths hold onto their mothers bellies for about the first 5 weeks of life, but up to 6 months. Sloths have very strong forelegs but very weak hind legs and cannot use their legs to walk on land, and their nails are a hindrance on land. If they are on land, they are really no match for predators such as big cats and can only fight by biting or clawing. To get around on land (because they fell out of the canopy, they generally only come down twice a month or so to poo and pee- no kidding) they need to dig their claws into the forest floor, and use their strong forelegs to drag their body and hind legs across the forest floor. They can swim pretty well, however, and if one fell into a stream they can use their long front arms to swim pretty well. 2 toed sloths are generally a little bigger than the 3 toed variety, and 2 toed have been known to be able to survive in captivity whereas 3 toed do not. They have these smiling faces I just can't describe, but I love them. I found a couple shots of them on the web which were a hundred times better than the ones we were able to get:

The right picture is a mother and baby 3 toed combo, and the upsideown sloth is a 2-toed. Can you not just fall in love with this creature?!

We wandered around in the canopy before coming down to the forest floor and hiked around to see some trees. There are huge strangler figs that tie their tentacles around native trees and slowly, slowly slowly strangle the native tree to death. This often leaves a hollow cavity in the center of a circular lattice of strangler fig that is normally only large enough to host birds, bats or snakes, but this one in particular has been kept perfectly empty by scores of tourists who have kept it perfectly hollowed out so that you can actually climb up the tree through the canal on the inside. It was pretty cool, actually. There is a hanging bridge adjacent to the tree-tunnel, so we all climbed up the inside of the fig to get back onto the canopy. I loved it!

When the tree-climbing fun was over, we went to lunch at a place in Monteverde called Sofia that was quite nice and actually kind of gourmet. I was the only one to get the sweet potato soup with a yucca crustini thing stuffed with cheese on the side that was really, really stellar. I wanted to have six more bowls. Other choices were plantain-crusted sea bass, chicken quesadilla (not like any I'd ever seen), stuffed red pepper or the soup. As a group, we were the only patrons in the quaint restaurant and lunch was a surprisingly delicious meal. I talked about urban growth and habitat loss with Bill and Carolyn who both seem to at least be fellow tree-huggers.

Everyone was pretty tired after lunch so with my 1 hour when I got back to the hotel I took a nap. At 2pm I threw shoes on and got back out to the wagon. We drove the short distance to a local coffee shop where they make monteverde organic, free trade coffee and we all bought a bit of coffee, it was actually a pretty cute place. We then drove to the nearby quaker cheese factory for a bit of a try and we got to try a little gouda. John bought some for later. None of the cheese was aged- which is really more of a cheese for a somewhat sophisticated palate, and this is made for quick sale and use. Funny.

We drove to the Monteverde cloud forest nature preserve which is land shared with the ecologists by the Quakers and part of the Quaker's original plot of land when they moved in the 1950s. I got sick of Marcos' blathering, so I was wandering ahead the whole time to keep myself occupied and avoid listening to him any longer. I didn't really see any amazing birds or wildlife on the walk- a few tree creepers (birds) and a hole where a tarantula probably lived, but I wasn't going to stick my hand in there to see if anybody was actually home. No snakes or amphibians. We walked one mile down a very even trail to a pretty waterfall at the end and looked a few minutes before turning around and going back out the way we came. John and I got behind looking for birds and after the group left, we managed to see a lot of them (although none of them too beautiful or spectacular to depict here). We were far behind the group and by the time we got out we met up with the group at the gift shop and hummingbird museum, which was lovely. Below: the Monteverde Forest Path

The hummingbird place was incredible. I was snapping pictures like a woman possessed, although those little wings are so incredibly fast none of them came out spectacular. They set up a million feeders all over the place with these benches so you can just sit and be amongst literally hundreds of hummingbirds coming and going at the feeders. There were at least 10 different species and we all sat there- no let me rephrase- J&C and I sat there mesmerized and were, of course, the last to leave. The hummingbirds we saw were: the (magnificent) and huge violet saberwing (bottom picture above), striped tail hummingbird, green-crowned brilliant, purple-throated mountain gem, coppery-headed emerald. To date we've seen 113 species of birds by John's list in Costa Rica and that makes us only 1/8 of the way through all the bird species here.

Hummingbirds (not my pics) Left: the violet saberwing; Right: the purple throated mountain gem. Gorgeous!

All in all, this was my favorite day on the trip.

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