16.10.2012 – 16.10.2012  29 °C

Our tour director Allan had us up and going early again today (I’ve decided that this isn’t a holiday but work!) to wander up into the Monteverde Cloud Forest. Today, we were entering into one of the famous areas in CR. It is a forest that is normally covered in clouds to look for more animals.

It might usually be covered in clouds but today we got super sunshine! Almost as soon as we entered the forest we spotted our first animal, a Tucanette! A very pretty birdy and a noise one too! The forest is one big rainforest so we saw plenty of big strangler fig trees, covered in orchids and bromeliads. Also plenty of Tarzan style swinging roots, which the boys just had to test out! Sadly, our mammal spotting opportunities were limited today with us seeing only one family of white faced monkeys… still no moving sloths :(.. Although the mammals were low on the ground we did get to hike up to the continental divide, and we did get to spend a couple of hours slowly wandering thru the jungle.. Much nicer than our mad dash up the volcano in La Fortuna!

Highlight of the walk was right at the end when we stepped out of the jungle and into an open-ish field. The field was filled with beautiful butterflies and the cutest little hummingbirds. My gosh these little guys can move, they just zoom thru the air. I upped my camera to close to max shutter speed and I still couldn’t get the little guys completely stationary.. Crazy!! The butterflies are equally elusive. Tony and I spent a good thirty minutes chasing one of CR’s big blue butterflies all over the park to try and get a stationary shot (or even a decent flying shot) of the gorgeous big butterflies with no luck..

On our way back into town we stopped in at a local bakery that actually sold sandwiches! We all chowed down on a real sambo and a yoghurt smoothie.. so good! Actually it’s near to the best sambo I’ve had since leaving Aus…. You can’t buy decent sandwiches in the US and it’s only been rice and beans up til today in CR, so yep, probably the best I’ve had since I left home!

I had a peaceful afternoon just hanging out at the hotel, snoozing, blogging and watching tv. For dinner, we all headed downtown Monteverde to hang out at the local pub where CR was again playing a team in soccer for WC qualifying. Ursula and I ate dinner and then actually left the boys to the game. It turned out that CR won 7-0 against El Salvador.. Pretty shocking score line….. Anyway, whilst we were not watching the game we had coffee at the tree house café. The café is built half way up in a big fig tree (with the trunk of the tree being in the centre of the café. Very cool little place to enjoy a coffee. Interestingly, we had to ask the staff to turn the heater on at the café.. Tonight I’m wearing a long sleeved shirt, jumper and rain jacket and I’m near the Equator!!! Just goes to show how high up we are. We rejoined the boys once the game was complete and rather than hang around and party at the pub we all agreed to turn in at a reasonable time so that we would be fresh-ish for tomorrow’s drive down to Quepos.