Monteverde

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Monteverde is a little town high up in the mountains, north of San Jose. Due to the poor road network, it takes a long time to get there. Traveling to this area is best in the dry season, as many of the roads are impassable in the rainy season. Monteverde is a cloud forest and is home to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and several smaller biological stations that conduct research and work on sustainability and preservation initiatives.

Monteverde was interesting. Besides being very challenging to get to, it was also challenging to live in. We thought our first apartment was too good to be true, and we were right. After purchasing a months worth of food, we were asked to leave after only 2 days. We were particularly bad tenants, you know, we did foolish things like asking for pots and pans in a "furnished apartment" and alerting the owners to a gas leak. But, I think we managed to get a little pay back with the doggie food rafters. Wonder how long it took them to realize where the smell was coming from?

Our second apartment couldn't have been more different. We rented an apartment in a "tree house" of sorts. Not really a tree house but definitely in the trees. Our two-week stay was relaxing and quiet, for the most part. We did have quite a few scorpions. One fell on James from the ceiling while he was in bed. And, it became the norm to nearly step on one around the house. As you can imagine, this made for some really restless nights (one of us waking in a panic sure that a scorpion was on the bed).

We got lucky and had Capuchin monkeys visit twice. We're posting that in a separate blog.

We liked Monteverde, but 3 weeks was plenty long enough. It was beautiful but really wet and slightly depressing.

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Photos

The weirdest dance..
I'm not sure what these guys were doing. It must be some sort of mating dance...

Montezuma Oropendola
One of the prettiest birds. To bad the photo didn't turn out that well.