Houston has an electric company called 'Green Mountain Energy'- this weekend, I went to their motherland (per se): Monteverde (green mountain), Costa Rica. Lots of great energies there.....or something like that.
I travelled with Stephanie and Amy (2 besties from New Mexico who are in my class, and staying about the same amount of time as me in Tamarindo) AND Katrin (a new student from Germany who lives in the same Costa Rican host-home with Steph and Amy).
We left right after school on Friday, and headed for the hills - literally. Another crappy roadway, but this weekend, we had lovely scenery along the way, especially as we got into the mountains. The ride was about 4 hours, and it got cooler and windier as we got higher and higher.
Estaban, our friendly Turismo driver.
Lucky us! Gravel-dirt-rock roads for 2 hours of our trip!
View from one side of the car.
Very lovely view from the other side of the car.
Once we got in, we checking into our B&B. 1 room + 4 girls = no problem! Camino Verde was a funky little B&B run by 2 young brothers.
Camilo Verde B&B
Our little house/hotel room
Hotel room - I slept on a top bunk (interestingly, at 29, a first for me).
We dropped our bags and hit the town.
Monteverde is a small town, so we conquered the entire town and ate dinner in about 2 hours. After dinner, we rested a bit, then checked out Bar Amigos, the one happening night spot in town Great live band- salsa and meringue.
The town of Monteverde.
Bar Amigos - always with my fave, Coke Light!
The next day was chock full o' activity. Seven am breakfast at the B&B, which included pancakes- a major treat- not too common around these parts. Then we went zip lining. We drove even higher up into the mountains and zip lined over and around the mountain for nearly 2 hours. A-MAZING views! Some zip lines went through the trees, while others were high in the sky above the trees. Zip lining Monteverde was one of the coolest things I have done- EVER!
Getting ready to zip line (from the left: Katrin, me, Amy, Steph).
Each zip-line platform listed some stats about our current location.
That's me, flying through the air.
In the forest with our gear and giant Mickey-Mouse-hand-sized gloves.
Zip lining also ended with a Tarzan Swing- sort of like a small bungee jump! We watched a couple other people do it first, and the guys working the lines would make sure the other visitors were all ready to go, double checked their comfort level and then counted off for them to jump. We sort of made friends with the guys working the zip lines that day, so I guess they thought it would be funny if they pushed all 4 of us off the edge. Very funny! NOT! When each of us had our respective turns, they would have us get close to the edge, tell us to bend our knees, and as we bent, they just pushed. No, 'Are you ready?' No, 'One, two, three...' It was probably a little more fun that way anyway - in retrospect, not necessarily at the time.
The view from the top of the Tarzan Swing (that's me at the bottom).
After that, we took a 2 hour hike around the mountain and across 8 different swinging bridges that went over, under, around, and through the rain forest. Also SUPER way cool.
Swinging bridge through the trees.
View from a swinging bridge above the trees.
View from the longest swinging bridge in the park.
After a packed morning, we went back to the B&B, and hit up a local soda for a late lunch. Costa Rican soda = a divey restaurant with cheap local eats. After that, we did a guided night hike through the forest.
All ready for the night hike- handy head lamp included.
P.S. fear not! Clearly by the looks of me in this photo, I am just as cool as I was before I left Texas.
Night hike= really, really, really dark, even with flashlights (and/or head lamps, in my case), and kind of spooky, but it in a really neato way. Sadly, not many pictures were taken on the hike. Too dark. However, here is a list of what we saw:
3 adult sloths and 1 (very cute) baby sloth- they usually hang high in the trees and only come down once a week to do their 'businees,' but we lucked out and caught a mama and baby only a few feet off the ground (and a few feet from where we were standing). Not so luckily, we did see mama sloth do her business- must have been that time of the week.
1 coati - sort of like a long-tailed raccoons
1 agouti- Costa Rica's second largest rodent
1 large tarantula
1,000,000 ants - very hard at work transporting leaves, 4 times the size of their bodies, back to their ant hill. Meanwhile, they make ant hills the size of human coffins, far bigger than those I have seen I TX.
1 green toucan
1 brown jay
2 different grasshoppers
4 white faced monkeys
1 (boring old, regular) possum
1000+ fireflies
The night hike was really cold and rainy (long-pants-long-sleeved-zip-up-hoodie-and-a-rain-coat cold), and that was the start of a very windy, chilly, and wet night in our area of Coasta Rica. During the night, I woke up several times to what sounded like cat 5 hurricane winds and flickering power. Along our ride home, we saw tons of down trees, down power lines, and fruit all over the place (high wind cleans the trees out lickity split). Monteverde and the surrounding area gets frequent high winds, but last night was even a bit uncommon for them.
Alas, back in Tamarindo. I maybe even missed our little beach town a bit, and after some chilly weather, I was glad to get back to some sun!
