Costa Rica Day 10 - Monteverde

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Not the best night’s sleep as the bed is small and uncomfortable. We get up and have breakfast - which reviews describe as ‘simple but tasty’. They’re half right! It comes with ‘juice’ of some undeterminable fruit (it tastes like flat Vimto). We ask the proprietor what flavour it is. He doesn’t know either, goes and checks the packet and returns to tell us it’s ‘grape’. The old man asks for different juice and a new packet is duly opened – this time it’s ‘pineapple’ and drinking it makes my eyes water. Breakfast is scrambled eggs on toast – no plantain 😞

After breakfast, we head to Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. It’s only 2 miles away, but a few hundred metres higher in elevation, which brings us up into the clouds.

We have to park a kilometre away in a hotel car park and pay $5, which includes a shuttle bus to the entrance. Then another $50 to enter the reserve. There are a number of trails, several of which are inaccessible as the hanging bridge has collapsed!

We select the Sendero Nuboso which leads onto the Sendero la Ventana. Here, we are promised a viewpoint across the Continental Divide (water on one side of the line flows into the Atlantic and on the other side, into the Pacific). It takes an hour to reach the viewpoint. When we arrive, all we can actually see is cloud. We return to the entrance via the Sendero Camino. It’s cold and wet and I’m over cloud forest by now, so I sit on a bench eating Oreos while the old man follows another trail to a waterfall.

We catch the shuttle back to the car and drive back into town. I want to stop to photograph a telegraph pole. The old man parks closer to the edge of the road than I realise. I try to climb out of the car onto the road, but there isn’t any road, so I end up on my arse in the ditch.

Once I have extricated myself and got rid of most of the mud, we stop at Monteverde Cheese Factory, where the old man has ice cream and I buy some locally produced cheese (Monte Rico) for lunch. After another stop for bread, we return to our hotel for a picnic on the bench outside our room, while watching a rainbow emerging from the clouds. We are theonly guests, so at least it’s quiet - apart from the howling of the wind.

In the evening, we head to a local restaurant, check out the menu, decide we’ve had sufficient fried food for one week and return to the supermarket for a bag of salad and some strawberries instead. Then it’s another early night, as it’s dark by 6 and there’s not much to do after dark except eat and/or drink.

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