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Published: February 21st 2010
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We left Manuel Anotnio in the morning catching the 10:30am bus to Punterenas, the bus was ridicuously hot and had lovely leather seats....hmmm sticky!!! At times I felt so hot I thought I would faint ( no exagerations!), in a half delusion I started fantisizing about pools with giant ice cubes! We arrived in Puntarenas around 1:30 pm where we grabed our bags and jumped on our next bus which left at 1:50pm this bus ride was also very hot but no where near as bad as the first bus!!! To compensate for the more bearable heat we instead had to endure dust,most of the road up into Monteverede is dirt tracks, all the dust came flying in through the open windows leaving a nice layer of dust all over us and our belongings. We arrived to Monteverde ( Santa Elena twin town) around 5pm and there we were greeted with a chilly breeze!!! My prayers were answered! The area is a lot cooler and at night we even had to wear sweaters!! Monteverde and Santa Elena are sourounded by two large cloud forest reserves. In 1983 National Geographic features this area for its landscpe and named it "the" place to
view the Quetzl, an absolutely beautiful Costa Rican bird. That night we didn't do much as it was already pretty late by the time we checked into our hotel, so we went straight out for dinner (we hadn't eaten since 9am!).
On our first full day we optedto wait another day to do our guided walk into th rainforest as the wind was very strong minimizing our chances to see wildlife. Instead we went to the butterfly garden where we chased the butterflies around in four different rooms trying to get some nice pictures. Oh how I wish for a macro lens!!! We then went to the insect exhibit which was great there was a guy there to tell us about all the cool bugs, spiders and scorpions! An interesting thing we learnt was about cockroaches, cockroaches are very clean and they do not igve us dieses!! And here we have been freaking out about dirtyness everytime we see one! We then went to have some ice-cream, the wind started picking up more so we legged it back to the hotel just in time before the rain started.
The next day we went to " Bosque Eterno de Los Ninos"
Reserve to organize our night hike and then we went to walk around in the reserve. The " Bosque Eterno de Los Ninos" was created by Swedish school kids who put money together and started buying forest land. It is now the largest private owned conservation forest in Costa Rica, it mainly survives from donation mostly from schools and universities around the world. At around 6pm our night hike started, there is something very eerie about walking in the rainforest in the dark with all the night creatures hissing and buzzing arund you. We saw some spiders, a tarantula, some birds, frogs and a bunch of different bugs. Unfortunately we didn't see any mammels or snakes but thats what wildlife watcing is about its a hit and miss situation, it was still a cool hike though.
The next day we went to the "Hummingbird Garden" after having played with the hotel owner's kids Julia and Pablo. We then walked down the road and jumped on the big yellow bus. The hummingbird garden was amazing the amount of birds in that tiny little garden! We spent a good few hours there taking pictures of the birds before taking the last bus
Massive Bug!
Elephant Beetle :
-Size Range 70-120 mm back at 4pm, we relaxed for the remainder of the afternoon.
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