As you will read below, I left my hotel room in quite a hurry this morning. In my haste, I forgot the memory card with the photos. Soon, hopefully this morning, I will retrieve it and add photos to this post, until then...
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We've spent the past 2 days in Monteverde. It's a nice little town, feels almost like a European-backpacker environment. There are lots of tourists here, long haired hippies drinking lattes and writing in their journals. I found Arenal to be more laid back and this town less-upscale, but with a much faster pace, if you were wondering...
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DO NOT DRIVE TO MONTEVERDE. This is a lesson that we learned the hard way. All roads leading to Monteverde are absolutely awful. Actually, referring to them as roads is libelous to roads everywhere. There should be a new word, whether English or Spanish, that refers to a strip of land rougtly 20 feet wide and 50 miles long that was cursed by God, suitable for no other purpose than to brutalize the kidneys of tourists as they bounce and bump along at about 15 miles per hour. The act of driving here quite literally, made me sick. Of course, once you arrive, it is a pretty cool place, but take the boat, take a helicopter, or walk. I've never missed the air suspension of the Range Rover as bad as I did on that God-forsaken drive.
This photo doesn't do the the road to Monteverde justice, but it is all I have:
When we booked this trip, there was a menu of hotels you could choose from in each town. In Monteverde we elected to pay a little extra to upgrade to a the Ficus hotel, which on the Internet, appeared to be cabins nestled in the rainforest. I suppose the pictures we saw were technically accurate, we had monkeys right out side the window at breakfast yesterday, and they ate fruit we left out for them. Further, directly outside our cabin, we saw an enormous sloth eating and climbing from tree to tree. This was quite fortunate. Most of the time, the untrained eye could pass by a sloth without even noticing it, as they spend 95%+ of the time sedentary. To see one moving around and eating, cool.
Back to our hotel. We laughed when we checked in, realizing that we'd paid extra money to stay here. Our cabin, which we thought we would have to ourselves, actually contains 3 hotel style rooms, and the walls seperating them are paper thin. So for the past 2 days, we've heard everything that out our neighbors said, did, or thought. This morning I was aroused (from sleep) by our amorous post-middle-aged neighbors starting their day off right. Not knowing if there session was pharmaceutically enhanced, and not willing to risk it, I came down to the lodge to write this blog. As I type this, they've just walked in for breakfast. Allowing 30 minutes for showering, dressing, &c., I'll assume no pharmacutics were involved...
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I've kind of lost track of days, but our last full day in Arenal, whenever that was, was a very physically strenuous day. We met our guide at 7:30 for a lengthy hike through the jungle/suspension bridges. We saw howler monkeys, poisonous tree frogs, lizards and the eyelash pit viper. The guide was very well educated, having a degree in ecology and 10 years experience. I kept quizzing him about names of trees and plants and he pretty much knew them all. After that jungle hike, we visited a waterfall. To arrive at the waterfall required walking down 500 steps, and not the kind of symetrical steps we have back home, but the physically exhausting kind you'd expect to find here. After hanging around the waterfall, which was quite beautiful, we hiked back up the steps. After a stop for lunch (good food) we went on the Volcano hike. Once again the guide was very informative and we enjoyed it. Sadly, my typical lifestyle is probably closer to the sloth than is healthy, so the cumulative hiking that we did took a toll on my legs. The last activity of the day was dinner at the Baldi Hot Springs. We ate a nice meal and then relaxed in the hot springs that come from the volcano. When we arrived back at our room around 9:00p.m., we had no trouble getting to sleep.
HANGING BRIDGES:
WATERFALL:
So we decided to use yesterday as I day of rest, but not wanting to waste the whole day, we went on another zip-lining trip. Which is a lot of fun, but not physically demanding. Here are some photos:
The last line on the trip is one of the longest in the world, over a 1/2 mile. Christena and I rode it tandem, which gives you maximum speed. It was a rush.
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If you have some extra time, here is a slide show of some random photos. Some of them probably need some explaining, but keep an eye out for a tarantula, a poisonous frog, and a sloth...
Today we make the dreaded drive back to San Jose. Tomorrow we return to the US. Our plane doesn't arrive in Orlando until 11:00 p.m. so we won't be back in Dothan until Tuesday.
Oh yeah, I don't know if it is something I ate or drank, but if you want a description of what is happening in my gastro-intestinal tract, watch the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan or read about a similar problem I had on Borneo last year (here).
As always, sorry about the typos/mispellings. Spellcheck doesn't work here. I tried to read back through this, but I'm sure I've missed a lot.
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