We wake up at 8am and it's beautiful and sunny outside. Not even a hint of the fact that we're staying in a cloud forest. Our plan is to go visit the
Selvatura Park and Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserve since it's much less crowded than the nearby Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. We spend the morning walking through the bridged canopies of the beautiful cloud forests, barely realizing that there are screaming tourists flying over our heads on zip lines. Ahhhh, this must have been just what it was like before the Spanish arrived. There's nothing like enjoying the beauty of nature as you're flying by it at 40 miles an hour.
We manage to get away from the zip-liners a bit and realize we are absolutely alone in this rain forest. It really is spectacular when you get away from the tourists. The bridges are a bit wobbly but don't feel unsafe or anything. Of course the plants are spectacular and I can't stop trying to identify them even though I have no clue what any of them are. Kathy rolls her eyes as I try to tell her what family I think various plants may belong to. She takes it all so well though because she really is the most patient person on earth. And I think she enjoys plants more than she lets on.
After spending about 3 hours on the hiking trail at Selvatura, we walk up the road a bit to Santa Elena Reserve. We truly are the only people in this entire park. It's so wonderful to be alone without anyone else around. We don't have time to hike the long trail, so we take a shorter trail instead that only takes us 1.5 hours to complete. We keep looking around for the resident sloths and spider monkeys, but they're really good at hiding and we're really bad at finding them. But we are assured that they do actually exist.
Us at the Rum bar owned by two Austinites that escaped Texas. The bar was really high!
Afterwards we head back down to town, tired, sweaty and hungry. We decide to go for some authentic Costa Rican pizza which is actually quite tasty. Me and Kathy manage to eat the entire 14" pizza (Steve 3/4, Kathy 1/4) before heading home to take a nap. Tomorrow we're heading to see Volcan Arenal in La Fortuna and in order to get there we have booked a route called a Jeep-Boat-Jeep. We basically take a jeep for the first leg then get on a boat to cross a huge lake, then back in a jeep again which takes us to La Fortuna. We'll see you guys then.
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