Our Travels: 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).