birds, fireflys, and a ton of trees

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Nos despertamos temprano esta mañana, to get ready for our plans that we made the night before in between our horrible salsa and wandering of this town. On the floor of out dorm room clothes were strewn every where. I guess we stumbled in after the bar and just cleared our beds and crashed...so we picked up opened the window to disperse the strong aroma of 3 dudes that havent showered in three days, which I finally got a hot one in today, and headed to the front of the hostel.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and went outside to the burrito vender and got me a breakfast burrito, which ·I regretted the rest of the day....damn gas from beans. Our shuttle picked us up at around 9 and we headed to the sante elana cloud forest to venture around and try and find animals. It was a short drive and cost like 2 dollars round trip...better then the hour walk there. We paid the park entrance fee, which I got half off because I randomly have my old college ID...so they thought I was a student. going to into the cloudforest the weather was at about 65 to 70 degrees clear and cool breeze...amazing to say the least. wondering the trails the only people there was me, anthony, and our newest recruit Yolla. got some amazing pics, peacefulness, and sore knees...damn being old. The forest was lined in moss and ferns everywhere. I couldn't begin to describe how it looked...maybe we finally discovered the garden of Eden. My camera died about half way through so I am relying on anthonys pics when he gets home. upon exiting there was a humminbird sanctuary, we posted up on the benches and had midmorning siestas in the mist of the humming birds. Woken up about an hour later by the flurry of visitors and tourist armed with cameras ready for there all out assault on the rainforest, instead the got pics of the beautiful birds and three american vagrants sleeping on the benches...

The shuttled returned and got us back to the hostel where we loaded up on another shuttle and headed down to Extremo tours for our zipline tour, which I also got at a student price. The Zipline was an amazing experience. The tour guides were all ticos who spoke broken english and objective, aside from guiding us, was picking up the women that were there and scaring the shit out of the highschool kids that showed up....they did everything from jumping out of trees to scare them to pretending like they were gonna drop them from the lines...We got good humor out of it.
Back to the ziplines. We were about 200ft up and tied to harness that was then attached to these metal lines which sent us frm tree top to tree top, in between you experienced views as if you were in a helicopter except you were floating. AMAZING simply AMAZING...all the lines were sitting up except the last one which is the longest, fastest and highest line...that we did superman style staring down at the ground and the mountains/volcans around us. And to top everything off they had a 100ft tall tarzan swing. here is a reference site. http://www.monteverdeextremo.com/

After we got back we spoke with a local Tico and got some info on a lugar secreto. A huge árbol that you could climb on the inside of. But it was hidden deep in the woods, and the sun was setting so we were advised not to go...so we went. It was the coolest thing, and topped our day perfectly. There were roots that were intertwined like a spider web you could climb to reach this tree hanging over the hill side...http://dangrec.com/monteverde/giant_fig_tree...freaking amazing. We ended up sitting at the bottom once we climbed down finishing watching the sun set and trying to catch fireflys...and started our long hike back home in the dark...down near the end of this steep gravel road on the edge of town was this quaint soda, which was actually a ladys house. We sat down and had one of the best home made meals I have had and it was as authentic TICO food as you could get..it was her house. Good conversations and laughs at the gringos in this locals spot. Full we headed back home, tommorow we leave at 8 by jeep - boat across lake Arenal - then jeep into la fortuna to hopefully swim in hotsprings and see the volcan erupt

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Comments

[Thurman]

Dammit
The fireflies got me man...my mom and I used to catch them all the time in our back yard...I'm definitely rolling wit next year. I'm bout to get a big ass jar and start throwing money in it for the trip. No joke.