Hello Santa Elena and Monteverde!

We woke up this beautiful morning to the fresh air of the mountains and the view to the Ocean was stunning. After a nice breakfast Chris thought it would be a great idea to go to the cloud forest and look around. Instead of waiting 45 minutes for the free shuttle we took a taxi the 25 minute drive further up the mountain.

The cloud forest here is approximately 1600 feet in elevation and is shrouded in mist for 9 months out of the year. This mountainous forest straddles the continental divide. Stevlatura offers canopy zip lines, sky walks, butterfly museum, hummingbird gardens, and an insect and reptile home. Today wasn't too sunny so the reception advised us not to bother with the butterflies, and the kids being so young and small we didn't attempt the zip-lines. But we did do all the rest. We started with the suspension bridges. There were 8 suspension bridges (totaling just over 770 meters) all along the 2.5 kilometer hike through the cloud forest. It was so interesting, the leaves of the trees arrange themselves to capture the sunlight without shading the others so that you can't see the forest floor from the bridges. I'm not sure how high we walked up, but we did quite a hike. I felt a little cheated not having a guide for the sky walk - I'm sure that we walked by many incredible things that were naked to the tourist eye, but it was fantastic none the less. We saw amazing, one of a kind breathtaking views, birds all over the place, and flowers through out the walk. We didn't see any monkey's, spiders, snakes, frogs or birds that we could recognize - but that doesn't mean they weren't there! I think the walk took us around 2 hours. We took our time, and had a lot of fun. Callym actually walked the entire way and said it was his favorite part of the day. The fresh air was so invigorating and made you just feel like you were a part of something special. It was hard once we came to the last bridge and knew it was almost over, I wanted to keep walking.... but there was more to see, and we were getting hungry.

We stopped into the restaurant there and ordered some delicious pizza a few fanta's and a coke. After lunch we headed off to the the humming bird gardens. It was very similar to the one we went to at Laz Paz Waterfalls, but it was smaller, and somehow had many more birds. We actually got very very close to the hummingbirds without scaring them off. The only drawback here was the enormous amount of wasps, they like the sugar water too. After that we waited for our guide to take us to the insect and reptile museums. The reptiles were both interesting, educational and disgusting! They had many different species both venomous and non. We learned how to tell the difference between the two as well, Quick Lesson: If you see a snake with small scales on it's head, and eyes like a cat (meaning that they have the vertical black colored slit in the center of it's eye, walk back slowly and once you are more than 2 meters away..... RUN). If the snake you come across has large scales on the top of it's head and it's eye's are more like a humans (meaning for one, there is no similarity to a cat's eye, and it has more of a round dark color in the center of it's eye), you should be ok, it is not venomous. One snake they have in a large cage is the 'bushmaster'. This is a snake that even the most experienced snake-man (or woman) will fear. This snake is not only extremely venomous (it can kill you with one bite, and if you do not die quickly, you will most likely need that limb to be amputated), but it is also very aggressive, and will seek you out to attack! Wonderful, but on a happier note, most of the venomous snakes are also nocturnal, so if you go out at night just make a lot of noise, or stay in well lit areas. BUSHMASTER..........

On to less scary reptiles. We finished that tour off with some toads, frogs, and lizards. We saw the Jesus Christ Lizard (it's actual name), named because it can run on water. The famous Iguana (the largest lizard in C.R., and apparently eaten by many people here - they taste like chicken!), The poisonous dart frogs (Callym's favorite is the blue jeans frog) - These are called Poisonous dart frogs because the indigenous people use to catch these frogs and lay there darts on the backs of the frogs to coat it with it's poison, this in turn would kill any animal that they shot with there darts. There are very poisonous to the touch (you need to wear gloves if you want to touch them), and they get there poison by eating ants. We also saw a toad, the same one that Callym saw hopping across the roadway in the dark in Brasilito. This toad secretes a white poison out his neck glands, when you come in contact with this it is more like a hallucinatory drug, some people, we are told, lick these frogs to 'see things'. (remember the lady kissing the toad and seeing a prince, this is the toad!).

Ok, so enough of that, we headed off to the insects. If you ask me, we should have stopped there, but we went on. Richard Witter is the collector of over a million insects from all around the world. He has many museums filled with creepy crawlers (we saw none that we still alive, so that made it a little better). None the less, all the spiders, scorpions, killer bees, cockroaches, beetles and other flying things made you feel at times that they were crawling all over you. I won't get into the details too much, but basically the bigger the insect, the less likely it is to be dangerous. Most tarantulas do not have poison, there hair will irritate you and their bite will hurt, but that's about the extent. Same for the scorpions, the large ones hurt when they bite you, but the one the size of an adult index finger (small eh?) can kill a human with their poison. We saw many extinct and near to extinct butterflies, bed bugs that can make you very sick, shiny beetles that looked like solid gold, walking sticks, and more. Needless to say, I was glad once we got out.

We made the 3 pm shuttle back into town and stayed for a nice snack. We walked around a little, and decided to check out the night tour for the frogs. Many of the really cool frogs are nocturnal, so this was a great chance to see them. We've seen many frogs before, actually we've seen them all, but being nocturnal we never got to really see them. Example, the red eyed tree frog just looks like a green blog on a leaf when it's sleeping, but when awake you see all of it's bright blue, orange and green colors, not to mention it's red eyes! This tour was really cool, and the boys loved it, and once we were leaving one of my demented dreams came true...... Right there, by the entrance doors and somewhat hiding beside the huge bag of coffee was a tarantula. A real one in the 'wild'!!! Granted, this one was only about the size of 2 loonies put together, but there it was. And I felt happy that I finally had the chance to see one up close. After all of this we headed back to the hotel to change and do a bit of relaxing. Santa Elena is an extremely beautiful place. It makes you feel alive with it's views and it's air. I wish we had more time here.