COSTA RICA

After more than 2 years we finally got to take a "real" trip together again! Costa Rica.
Get ready for lots of rainforest and palm trees!!!

Monteverde / Santa Elena

After arriving in San Jose we headed straight to Monteverde in the northern part of Costa Rica, with the help of Interbus, a pretty reliable minibus/minivan company, shuttling tourists all around the country. The drive to the famous cloud forests of Monteverde and Santa Elena took 4 hours and the last hour of the drive was extremely bumpy (for those who have gone up to Nathan's parents' ranch: it was about as rough as the first steep hill). In this case the rough road is a good thing though as it prevents tourism to completely flood the scenic village of Santa Elena and the rain forests. It is already pretty touristy there, and though the cloud forests jokingly are called "crowd forest" we didn't thing that it was overly busy. Maybe a good thing to be there during the first part of the off-season (also called start of the raining season). Monteverde / Santa Elena offer lots of activities. The primary attraction being the two cloud forests - the larger one of them Monteverde Reserve. Though it covers about 10000 hectares, only 200 people are allowed inside at the same time. Furthermore, there are a lot of zip-line (for more explanation have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_line) and canopy tour operators, who each have their own lines and hanging bridges through the tree tops- outside the preserved areas of the forests. We were happy enough to see the trees from the bottom and visited Monteverde. As recommended, we hired our own guide, which proofed to be effective. "Rolando" was extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the forest and gave us a 3-hour tour, explaining plants and animals. We even got to see some! It was very rainy in the rain forest...

Plants growing on trees.

Trees being strangled by- help me Nate!Nathan and Rolando looking for the Howler Monkey (deutsch: Bruellaffe). These monkeys are named correctly, they make quite the noise. It sounds like the bark of a seal (Seeloewe)- in my opinion. We actually got to see it but at this point couldn't take a picture as he was too far up in the trees.

Many tropical flowers/blossoms. Hummingbirds (Kolibri) like these.

Large fern.

Not poisonous.

Caterpillar. Rolando showed us how to find out if male or female by turning it around. If there are some shorter points on the 6th body segment it's a boy.

Walk over the cool hanging bridge. For once we were higher than the bottom of the trees.
Here Rolando spotted the famous "Quetzal", the pretty blue, green and red national bird of Costa Rica. He usually is not so easy to see but he sat still long enough for us to take pictures (through Rolando's telescope).

After the tour we decided to explore by ourselves. Pretty big trees!

And a proper hug for a tree can't be missed!

Posing in front of a waterfall... a small one in comparison to the one we hiked to the next day....

Outside the park they had a hummingbird (Kolibri) garden. Nothing against the Texas hummingbirds but the Costa Rican ones are so much prettier!

San Luis Waterfall

The day after visiting Monteverde reserve we hiked to the waterfall San Luis, in the lower part of the cloud forest. It was a great walk and we only met 3 people on the way. It made us feel as if we were the only people in this breezing, alive forest- everything so lush and growing. As it was sprinkling almost constantly, the trails were pretty slippery but that made it feel more like a proper hike.

Clouds hanging in the trees at all times - hence the name Cloud Forest!

Over a few bridges...
Finally after 1.5 hours the waterfall! The photos don't do it justice. It was really huge and started way high in the cloud forest (on top of the picture in the middle the little gray line - that's a part of the waterfall).Usually you can swim in the pools around the waterfall but it was a bit chilly that day.

o.k. this is the last one.

We met some crawlies (luckily no spiders to that point!). We saw some large blue butterflies, but unfortunately they never sat down for us.

When the sun finally came out on our hike back, everything was even greener - almost blinding.Some more pretty flowers. The cloud forest is on continental divide. Monteverde is on the Pacific side. Outside the forest we could see all the way to the Pacific at a view point.

Coffee Tour

What is one of the things Costa Rica is known for? Coffee! And they have pretty good one. Monteverde with its high elevation supposedly has good climate to grow coffee. That's why we decided to take a coffee tour. We visited a local farmer, belonging to an organic co-op of about 12 farms. They each harvest their coffee and process it at the same mill.

This is a coffee plant. Here the flower. Late April is the blooming time, harvest is from November through February.

Still, there were some berries left.

This is the bean inside the berry, which would later be dried, roasted and packed.
As each farm is fairly small and they don't only want to rely on coffee so they grow all sorts of fruit ranging from mangoes, to paypays and bananas (here a banana flower)......to sugar cane. In this old press (I am sure they use machines for bigger scale pressing) the juice is extracted from the sugar canes. This juice can be boiled down in order to get crystal sugar or is the base for rum!We got to drink some of the juice, it was extremely sweet. That's a pile of "empty" sugar canes.After visiting the actual plantation we went the mill. Unfortunately we missed the harvest time and everything we learned at there was more theory than practise. We got to see all the (sleeping) machines and they described the whole process of extracting the beans from the berries, washing, drying, roasting (if coffee is exported, it's actually roasted in the destination country), packaging (by hand as it's such small coop), the use of the remaining berry shells (fertilizer), what to do with the non-Grade A berries etc. We learned how much coffee one plant can carry per season, how much one picker can pick in a day (10 boxes per day), how much he earns ($2 per box), for how much the coffee is sold ($5 per box)- all other numbers I forgot already.

Fortuna / Volcano Arenal

We left Monteverde on a foggy day. The long bus ride to the lake was extremely bumpy again - the Lonely Planet called the road one of the 10 worst of the country. At the lake we took a boat ride to the Caribbean side of the continental divide. Our destination was Fortuna, the little town on the bottom of Volcano Arenal, the third most active volcano in the world.

Bye bye Monteverde!
On the other side of the lake the weather was not any better and the volcano was covered in clouds. Though it's very usual that you don't see the volcano due to bad weather, we were still a bit disappointed.
In the afternoon we just hung out in rainy Fortuna, which was very touristy and offered even more jungle tours, canopy and zip-lining, rafting and several pretty expensive (and over-the-top) hot spring tours. In spite of the rain we took a night tour in order to catch a glimpse of the lava, which was described to us as absolutely incredible. The tour was actually fun, we were a small group of 8 people, everybody had to take a flash light and we walked through the dark forest surrounding the volcano. When we arrived the outlook point the clouds actually opened up and we got to see lava rolling down the hill! In addition you hear the constant noise of rocks (per our guide they weigh up to 20 tons) rumbling and falling.

Our camera is pretty bad, so we only can offer you this picure. If you enlarge is multiple times you can actually see some red flickers, which I circled (click on the picture).

This is a stolen picture, but that's how it's supposed to look. We defenitely got a tiny impression of it.

As our tour was pretty cheap it did not include the fancy hot springs. But we all got to take a bath in the nearby very hot river for no extra charge!

We feel like we got what we came for but as the next morning greeted us with heavy clouds and rain, we took the earliest bus (6.15am- life really starts early there!) down the coast to the beach!

Manzanillo

Manzanillo - Or - "the search for the perfect beach"Punta Uva