Volcan Arenal

Our last destination was the town of La Fortuna below Arenal Volcano.  

We took a long bumpy ride down to lake Arenal, and then we took a ferry across the lake.  We were surprised to see the volcano at all, because many people we spoke to said it was covered in clouds the entire time they were in the area.  

The volcano and the lake. 

Our ferry ride. 

We stayed at El Silencio del Campo hotel which had spectacular gardens and individual cottages.

Bananas growing over one of the sidewalks at the hotel. 

We went canyoneering in Lost Canyon.

On our last day in the area we went to Arenal Volcano national park and hiked through a few different types of forrest, the first section looked like bamboo.

This is a baby Eyelash Viper, which is deathly poisonous. 

We saw quite a few of these lizards with bright blue tails.

We were lucky enough to spend the whole day under the volcano. 

As we were walking back to the parking lot, a Coati crossed the path and started digging through the leaves next to the trail. It let us walk right up to it and take a few photos. s

when we got back to the parking lot, our taxi driver pointed out this big monkey, which we were glad to see because we had not seen any monkeys yet.  

See if you can tell what gender it is. 

Then our taxi driver talked us into hiking down to La Fortuna Falls which is about 200ft tall.

The morning we had to head back to the airport was clear and bright.  It was a great place to be and we lucked out on perfect weather. 

The view from our front porch. 

 

Costa Rica continued - Monteverde

Location 2 was Monteverde up in the cloud forest.  We spent two days there, day 1 was spend hiking through the cloud forrest reserve looking at the many plants and bugs, and searching for the larger animals. 

here are my best shots from the reserve. 

glass wing butterfly.

We saw these bright red bugs flying, and when they flew the wings looked bright blue.  So Tia decided to catch one. It was not until I was editing the photo that we saw the gigantic stinger. Tia was lucky this one was friendly. 

A small birds nest along side the trail.

Here is a bug we saw, it was crazy. 

We frequently would stop and listened for 10 or so minutes to see if we could spot any mammals.  We were lucky that this Coati decided to show it self to us. It is a little bigger than a raccoon, but with a monkey tail. 

This bridge is more than 300ft high, although it does not feel that high because you can not see the ground, but only the tree tops below.  as we left a cloud rolled by and covered the bridge. 

Us on the bridge.

That night we went back to our bed and breakfast, I took a short walk behind the house to take some sunset photos. 

The next day we went zip lining in Selvatura adventure park.  It was awesome.  The last line was 1 kilometer long (that is 0.6 miles) 

And they had a giant swing, kind of like we set up for the kids.  I think we need to set one up more like this for the little ones.