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Published: February 25th 2017
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Monteverde! For years I have wanted to come here - the mysterious cloud forest. I didn't particularly know what to expect, but I definitely didn't expect the cold! It was also raining on us, but the sky was blue - that's how strong the winds were! I have since read that February is known for its strong winds, so they shouldn't be that bad all year.
We headed off to the Monteverde reserve early in the morning, ready for a full day of walking. There are only 4 buses in each direction, so we had to plan to be back at the entrance in time for one of these. When we got to the park we were given a map of the trails, and were told to do them all would take 5hrs. We did most of them in half this! With this in mind we decided to get the 11pm bus back to town, rather than finish the last 1.5km of trails and have to then wait until 2pm for a bus.
Disappointingly we didn't see much wildlife on our walk - 3 birds and 2 butterflies to be exact! We heard a few more birds, but I think they
were sensibly hiding from the strong winds!
Once we got back to town we went to investigate a tree we had been told about. When we first heard of the tree it was described as 'a tree you can climb for free' well whoop de doop I thought...you can climb most trees for free! Upon investigating further however we found that it's a tree that you can climb up the inside of, resulting in popping out above the canopy. This sounded a little more interesting. Once we found the tree it was very impressive, and looks like it is specifically grown to climb! I wish they had these in England.
That evening, as I had not done as much walking as I thought I would, I went out on a guided night walk through the forest. Andy and Jess decided to give it a miss, as it was $25 and after not seeing many animals earlier they doubted it would be worth it. This night walk turned out to be fantastic. As soon as we started the tour we were shown a sleeping sloth right outside the centre, before heading in to the jungle to see what else we could
find. The two hour walk flew by and we saw a number of sleeping Toucanets and mot mots, two green viper snakes, two of the 44 native species of tarantula!, a red eyed tree frog (which I had really wanted to see), a kinkajou and two olingos (the last two are endangered species so we were very lucky to see them). On our final stream crossing we even saw an Armadillo scurrying away! This completed the list of animals I had wanted to see, and far exceeded what I expected to see. The guide was great at spotting creatures, and very knowledgeable too. The company is called kinkajou, and I'd highly recommend them.
The next day we headed out to the very famous zip lining. I was prepared to be a bit underwhelmed as I grew up with a lot of garden zip lines, but it definitely exceeded my expectations, with 1km lines. The last 2 were superman lines - where your feet are suspended too so you are laying on your front. Add in the high winds and I was rocking around a fair bit! I hadn't been forewarned about the amount of walking back up hills we would
have to do here - and my legs were definitely aching the next day!
Next stop - back to the beach and hopefully warm up a bit!
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