Watch out Tarzan...

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Costa Rica Rocks!
This is definitely our favourite so far.
First stop was Monteverde, which is a little town in the middle of a cloud forest with the main focus on adventure sports. White water rafting, zip lining through the forest, Tarzan swings etc. We found a great hostel, the best we have stayed in so far, for only $6 per person per night. Nice new rooms, hot water showers, free breakfast, free internet and the loveliest owner, Ronny, who immediately made us feel like part of the family (see the photo of Jason and Daniel, Ronny's son). So off to a good start.
We arrived there at about 7am after catching a 4am bus from some little town in the middle of nowhere (we failed to get all the way to Monteverde from Nicaragua the day before due to lack of buses...), this bus took 3 hours to travel 30km... the roads are incredibly bad, some of the pot holes looked like dried up river beds and small lakes. Upon arriving we booked ourselves onto one of the zip line tours for that day.

It was SOO much fun! They have 11 zip lines (or flying foxes as we Kiwis know it..death slide for you English people...) which range from 70 metres to 500+ metres in length and about 200 metres off the ground. They lock you on with some piddley carabena, you sit down in your harness and you are off! Actually it wasn’t nearly as scary as I was expecting but was way more fun!
They also had the Tarzan swing where you jump off a platform about 3 storeys high and swing through the trees on a rope...so scary...I really wanted to scream as I jumped off but the wind is knocked out of you and you cant even make a sound.
Later that evening we went on the Night Jungle Tour in hope of seeing some of the wildlife that live in the National Park there. The guide was amazing, very knowledgeable, and could see all sorts of creepy crawlies that we would have otherwise been unaware of. Most creepy of all was the two stripy-knee tarantulas that he pointed out right next to us on a tree....eeeekkk.
We also took a night jungle tour and saw monkeys, a tree porcupine (news to us that tree porcupines even existed...), a blue Morph butterfly (second biggest butterfly in the World, it should have been asleep but we woke it up with our stomping around and torches...), a spiky lizard, and a range of weird bugs including the devil bug that took great pleasure in landing on me.

It was such a great (and long) day, and we booked our transfer for the next morning to Arenal...more on that soon.

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