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Morpho Man
Using a variety of man made stuff, Mark attempt to mate with a Blue Morpho butterfly We had the opportunity to visit one of the prettiest towns in Central America. I won´t tell you where it is on this world wide blog, find it yourself. But it is set in a valley at 2000 feet above the sea surrounded by cliffed faced mountains verdant green with primary and secondary forest. While we were there we took advantage of the closeness of the pueblo to the forest trail to do some of the finest hiking you can imagine. Midori and I spent the first day conquering hills to the most awesome waterfall I have ever seen in thirty years of travel. Midori was too shy even out in the middle of nowhere, but I swam like a naked baby there for an hour. Pure heaven and I felt like Adam must have in the garden of Eden surrounded by God´s perfection on Earth- raw nature. The next day we rented inner tubes and spent the day enjoying rapids and crystal clear rivers alone.
Arisa and I had the last day without Midori who was nursing the sore muscles from the previous two days of activity. So we arrainged for a guide to hunt for Blue Morpho
Smells like Lemon
The leafs of the forest have a variety of interesting properties like smell. Unfortunely it is very difficult to hike while taking full advantage of smelling this particular leaf. butterflies in the primary rainforest of the national park just outside the pueblo. Edgar met us right on time at 8 and was kind of serious, yet friendly. We had also asked for a taxi to take us to the trail head rather than spend another 6 hours round trip hiking the road to the national park. Arisa like snakes and reptiles, while I am partial to insects. As we cruised to the trailhead we had the opportunity to tell Edgar about this and he planned the trip. We would head up the valley in secondary rainforest into the park and spend the second half of the hike in primary rainforest. There we would climb a waterfall for 40 minutes, spend some time there and return to a swimminng hole by the river. THe hike began in some guys farm and we ambled past fields of rice, bananas and coffee. We soon found the river which was so pure I can only describe it as only slightly more dense than air. You could see every pebble on the bottom clearly. Edgar said that it was one of the three most important rivers in the country and absolutely pure enough to
Tree Kissing
Arisa kisses rainforest for the blessing to hike there. At least that is what Edgar told us. I couldn´t help thinking of all the nasty lips that had been there before. drink. As we crossed a mud puddle he looked carefully for tracks, explaining that on the previous hike he had seen Jaguar tracks there. We headed deeper into the forest and could constantly see the river below. We stopped whenever Edgar saw something and throughout the day we were fortunate to see green and black metallic poison dart frogs, golden metallic beetles, two types of toucans, a quetzal, massive walking stick insects, spiders who use the leaves in the forest as a type of canopy to protect them from the rain, and finally as we waited by the river after our swim we used my raincoat and a cookie wrapper to attract the 4 species of Blue Morpho butterflies that inhabit this pure forest. The Blue Morpho can be described as having a wingspan up to 8 inches and it looks like the top of it´s wings are coated with a blue aluminum foil. Really takes your breath away when you see them and you can´t help but say something stupid like ¨look at that¨or ¨there´s one!¨. I did a pretty good job of getting them within a few feet by wearing my blue raincoat and doing my best impersonation
Rainforest We love you!
No photo could do justice to the beauty of this place.. of a giant butterfly with a small version made of a Nuevo Intenso blue foil cookie wrapper with two sticks on each side to help me get the basic butterfly movement copied. This was an awesome day, just to be surrounded by massive amounts of raw nature and with a guide who could point out so many interesting plants, animals and insects of the rainforest.
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Clay
non-member comment
With that leaf in your hat and blue butterfly mating rituals... plus Arisa kissing the tree... Midori (staying home and avoiding the Jaguars) may have been the only rational person in Central America.