Monteverde is a Small Quaker Town

While everything in Costa Rica may cost more than it would be to buy a small country, it seems that public transportation is still a reasonable way to travel.

Cammi and I spent the morning of our third day traveling from the city to the mountains. We headed to Monteverde, which is one of the most well known (and consequently most tourists infested) cloud forests in the country (and maybe the world).  This is also an adrenaline/adventure location (although now I'm beginning to think that the whole country is the New Zealand of Central America).

While the entire region is called Monteverde, the actual city itself is really a small "blink and you'll miss it" town that was originally started by Quakers. The place where the bus drops you off and that seems like a real town is called Santa Elena. The whole region is a series of natural reserves, nature, and pay to explore "one of a kind" experiences.

The actual Monteverde reserve contains a large section of primary forest and ancient trees with bases that would take 20-30 people holding hands to circle. it is a cloud forest, as opposed to a rainforest because it is at a high enough elevation that the clouds are there and the rain is below. That is basically the difference between the two.

Although Cammi and I were set up at a hostel/lodge in Monteverde with the help of Stacey, we never made it to the actual Monteverde reserve, nor did we really enjoy our isolation. Santa Elena and the main hub of activity were a 3.5 km walk from the relative quite and isolation we were inadvertently booked into. It was quite peaceful out in the boonies though and the proprietor was wonderful, but it was isolated and expensive to go back and forth to town.

We put the two days that we were there to good use with a night hike, a canopy zip line tour, and a hanging bridge walk; the latter two were through the cloud forest and the former was through a secondary rain forest.

The night hike was at The Children's Eternal Rainforest, a nature reserve started in 1987 by the Monteverde Conservation Group in partnership with multiple other countries (it's up to 44 countries currently). It's the largest reserve in the country and gets larger all the time as more and more land is bought to be preserved.

We spent two hours wandering through the reserve as our trusty guide pointed out various plants and species of wildlife. Even though they tell you you might not see anything and the guide tells you he doesn't know the location of any animal per say,  our guide either had superman sight or knew where the animals were cause he'd point out little birds and insects way in the mist of trees that I'd never have seen on my own in the dark. Cammi and I didn't find our sloth (to hug and squeeze and call George), but we did see some Cotemoundi, frogs, birds, bats, and a tarantula.

The genuine adrenaline rush began the next morning with a trip to the Selvatura Aventure Park. Cammi and I signed up for the canopy tour and the canopy walk. The former was a two hour zip-line excursion through the canopy of the cloud forest and the latter was a 3km walk through the forest, with 8 hanging bridges.

The zip-line was amazing and had various different lengths and heights above the forest floor. The longest run was 1000 meters and you went tandem (one person with their legs holding on to the person in front of them). The idea is that if you go this way you'll have more weight and thus more speed, which is needed to not get stuck. Apparently Cammi and I together don't weigh enough or aren't very aerodynamic because we got stuck about three quarters of the way to the end. Cammi was rescued by the guide, who came out to wrap his legs around her waist amd monkey crawl along the wire to the end. I rescued myself.

There was also a Tarzan swing that you could try. You were hooked to two ropes and then jumped from a platform and fell about 5 feet before going into a swing. I climbed the platform and took photos of those that jumped, but chickened out when I was supposed to jump. That's sad when you consider to two people terrified of heights both sucked up up amd went. Oh well, I'll wear my wimp badge proudly.

The canopy walk consisted of a nice easy trail through the cloud forest from which you could attempt to spot wildlife. The highlight though was a series of hanging bridges that were suspended anywhere from a few feet to hundreds of feet above the ground. We got lucky in that it was sunny amd clear and we could therefore see quite a distance. I did figure out though that hanging bridges are the answer to how you can get motion sick while walking.

On a random side note, while in Monteverde I was also on email and Skype with a contracting company that decided to pick me up, but wanted me home ASAP. We settled on a week and a half later and the end result was that my open-ended adventure became very limited. It also forced Cammi and I to reevaluate our travel plans and pick just a few places to visit.