Our first destination in Costa Rica was the idyllic oceanside town of Montezuma. It was a strikingly beautiful place, and somehow its touristy-ness didn't take anything away from the experience for me. We woke up, had delicious local fruit salad for breakfast (which consisted of some of the best mangoes, papayas and pineapple I'd ever had), poked around in tidepools until the weather got too hot, then floated about in the ocean for a bit. There is something almost magical about a warm ocean - it seemed that as soon as the water swept over my feet, all of the stress from my hectic weekend was literally washed away.
Afterward, we spent the better part of the afternoon reading in the shade in the hammocks of our hotel's courtyard, although before long I was lulled to sleep by the sound of the nearby waves. It was so perfect it was almost a caricature of a tropical vacation. By the end of the day, I found myself entertaining half-baked notions of fleeing my responsibilities back home to move to Costa Rica and open a store by the beach selling trinkets to tourists.
But of course, we have much more to see in our two short weeks, so, feeling recharged from our short but powerful stay in Montezuma, we headed up to the cloud forests of Monteverde.
We woke up at the crack of dawn this morning to take a five-hour hike through the cloud forest. This was definitely one of the cooler things I've ever had the privilege to do. However, something that surprised me (although I suppose it shouldn't have) is that rainforest wildlife is extremely elusive. All of the posters and books and museum exhibits I've seen about the rainforest had me picturing colorful birds filling every tree, poison dart frogs under every leaf. This was absolutely not the case, as in the five hours we were there, I could probably count the different vertebrate species I saw on my fingers. And what we did see wasn't terribly exotic-looking: mostly drab-colored birds, a chubby brown squirrel, a brown snake. Although, we did see a cool iridescent blue ant and a huge purple hummingbird, and I think I might have seen a toucanet, but I only got a glimpse of it as it flew between trees. That's the thing - there may be a lot of animals, but there is a TON of stuff for them to hide in. This was okay, though, because the forest itself was filled with absolutely amazing plants, and the calls of all the birds we couldn't see filled the air around us. Plus, the weather was perfect. It was really beautiful.
Almost immediately after getting back from our hike, we headed up to go zip-lining. Although this is billed as a "canopy tour", the forest flies by too quickly to get a good look at it, and any animals have long since been driven from the area by the screams of the zip-liners. It was a little scary for me, but a lot of fun. There were some short cables, but there were some really long ones (one was a whole kilometer long!) that had you flying across a valley with the forest far below you. At one point I turned my head to the left and saw a vulture soaring, at my eye level. At times like those, it was hard for me not to imagine the cable snapping and me falling, terrified, to my death. But of course, the cables held, and I really did have a lot of fun.
Afterward, we were all starving as we hadn't really had a chance to eat all day, so we made copious amounts of tacos in our hostel's kitchen. Unsurprisingly, we all ate way too much. Now I think I'm going to go down to my room and be fat and read a book. Tomorrow we head to La Fortuna for another rainforest hike, followed by white water rafting the next day. Wish us luck!
P.S. We forgot to bring the USB cable for our camera, so there will be no pictures until we get home. Sorry!
