We landed in San José in the afternoon of the 24th of July (or the night in Geneva). Arrived, the passport checker stamped the Costa Rican stamp🇨🇷 on our passports!!!The”real” trip had actually started😱!!! Then, knowing that life in San José was too noisy and not made for us, we moved on to Monteverde, where we met some very nice people who rented us a cabin. Their names are Beth and Manolo. Both are very nice guides. They have a very nice fruit garden, which they showed us, filled with different kinds of bananas, peanuts (🥜!!) and yummy black raspberries. It even has my favourite: passion fruits!
The atmosphere in Monteverde was pretty calm, very relaxing 😎, and very natural.
When you went out of the place where we were, (and drove about five minutes and into the city), it didn’t become noisy, but it wasn’t very calm either!!!
The same evening as our arrival in Monteverde (on the 25th), we drove (about 10/15 min) to the Santa Maria natural reserve. Arrived, they gave us each a little torch, and Manolo said, “That’s all the only light 💡 you are going to have!”😩 Then, we left into the forest 🌳. It was very spooky, considering that we had only one torch 🔦 per. person as a light.
During that night tour, we saw a:
- toucan
- scorpion 🦂 – we had to switch off our torches, Manolo put on the blue light and we could see the scorpion scurry around.
- viper (snake) 🐍 – all curled up in a tree. No idea how Manolo managed to spot it!!
- sloth (two of them) – or my little brothers in the morning!
- kinkajou – an animal in between a racoon and a monkey
We were very lucky!!!
On the 26th, we did a day tour at the Monteverde cloud forest reserve with Manolo and Beth, who gave us cards with things to spot in the forest (like “a dinosaur”) ( answer: did you know that some trees lived at the time of the dinosaurs and still live now?) . The tour announced itself very good: we started by seeing three resplendent quetzals!!! Afterwards, we saw a:
- orange knee tarantula 🕷- in its nest
- tent bat 🦇- hidden in a leaf
- tarantula wasp – it stings the tarantula to paralyse it, then lays its eggs inside, feeding from the tarantula’s inside. Leaving the vital organs for last, all the while the tarantula just sits paralysed. So smart, so cruel!
- frog 🐸 – tiny, but maybe harmful!
- side striped palm pit viper
We then went to the hummingbird park, where we saw lots of hummingbirds, and I thought the violet saborwing hummingbird was the most beautiful of them all.
