Reunited and it feels so good - Monteverde

Sybil and Parker don't always get along, they are sisters after all, but it was such a joy to see their interactions after being apart for a week.  [Cara and I were pretty pumped to see each other as well.]  Within 3 minutes of Parker and I walking out of the Liberia airport, Cara and Sybil pulled up with smiles and waves!  It could not have been planned/executed any more perfectly.  We had about a 2.5 hour drive to our next destination in the mountains of the Monteverde region.  Before hitting the road in ernest, we stopped for a traditional Costa Rican lunch, and I had my first pinto gallo (rice and beans)....I truly felt like I had arrived.

S&P love the chicken soup and rice.  Later at this lunch we saw our first iguana.  At first, Cara thought it was just a statue.  She almost had me convinced until it quickly moved as we got closer and startled me and the girls.  Little did we know that we would see iguanas at every outdoor eatery we would stop at during the coming days.

The frog pond at Valle Escondido in Monteverde.  This past year/spring was a rough one for me after Papa died in the fall.  Although I was excited about travelling to Costa Rica, I could not muster the motivation to put effort into planning the trip and instead treated it much like our previous international adventures-pre kids.  Thinking we'd just mostly wing it.  Cara picked up on how disengaged I was from the planning process and after months of research, she booked a bunch of hotels and eco lodges while I was out on a night bike ride. 

After just our first meal at the farm to table restaurant on site, I realized what an awesome job Cara did.  This place is amazing!  They practice permaculture on site and teach classes while also running their hotel and restaurant.  They also maintain miles of trails throughout the surrounding rainforest that lead to waterfalls and into the adjacent valley.  But most importantly to the girls, they have an awesome green space with a frog pond just in front of the restaurant where we would enjoy most of our meals and also just steps from our room.

The girls spent several hours over the 2.5 days we were here catching tadpoles and creating a mini ecosystem in our frisbee to observe them before putting them back safely in the pond.

The amazing view from the top deck of the restaurant. You can see over 40 km to the Nicoya Peninsula and the Pacific Ocean when the clouds parted.

Our first morning on site, we took a hike through the surrounding rainforest.  Although we had great views of the valley and a waterfall, we were a bit disappointed that we did not see a sloth and only a handful of capuchins from a distance.  I did also get to see my first impressively large ficus tree.  Sybil did her best Tarzan impression while hanging from the vines.  They were impressively strong and easily held her weight.

Cara and Sybi have been on the road for a week, and we still had not seen the sweet 4WD machine that was safely transporting them throughout the volcanic mountains.  This little Mitsubishi is not quite the Cactus Killer, but it is super fun to drive and gives us a lot of confidence as we navigated the steep, slick, and sometimes very rutted roads of the mountains of Costa Rica.

After naps and during the inevitable afternoon rain storms, we went to an indoor sloth sanctuary.  During a Houston style thunderstorm we learned about 2-toed sloths and got to observe them up close.  Most of the sloths in their sanctuary were rescued as babies after their moms had been killed (mostly by road accidents).  The two toes describes their front paws, all sloths have 3 toes on the back.  Who knew their noses are so pig like?  Other sloth facts we learned: They sleep 17 hours a day, there body temp. is very low which is one reason they have slower metabolism, they are the second most sedentary mammal behind the koala, they leave their tree once a week to poop which provides fertilizer for the tree and marks their territory, they have a varied diet of leaves and fruits, in the wild they grow moss on their fur which makes them even more camouflaged, and THEY ARE AWESOME!

Me, Cara, and three sloths

Although they don't move much and mostly sleep, this sloth put on a show for us!

Blowing Off Steam at Arenal Volcano

We had heard and read about the awesome hot springs in Costa Rica near the hot springs town and tourist paradise of La Fortuna. We stayed at the Arenal Volcano Observatory and Lodge located right outside Arenal National Park and, as you can see below from the picture from our balcony, a frisbee pull away from Arenal Volcano. 

The Arenal Lodge has 7 miles of trails on the property through primary and secondary forest, but is much more developed and accessible than the lodge at Pocosol and would be perfect for traveling with extended family. The forest was also different and reminded me more of the temperate rain forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, made up of mixed coniferous and deciduous forest. Our first morning there we saw spider monkeys off of the restaurant balcony. 

Our first day was reserved for Hot Springs. The one I wanted to go to, Kalambu Hot Springs, was closed so we went across the street to the very swanky, very over the top, but also amazing Baldi Hot Springs. They boast 25 different pools of varying temperature. 

Sybil just learned to swim this spring, and she can't get enough, so we were in the water from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with a quick 45 minute break for a buffet lunch. We played "whales" for about 3 hours, and  (thankfully) she found another kid to play with (kid travel tip: bring sinking pool toys for hours of entertainment). It rained the entire afternoon, but it was perfect to sit in the warm pool and have cool rain falling from above.  

The next day we went on a tour of Don Olivio's family finca, or farm, where they grow cacao and coffee. They also had about 12 different fruits growing on the property, and we got to taste about 8 of them right off the vine (banana criollo, papaya, pineapple, guyabano, sugar cane, orange, cacao, and mango)! They had lychee, star fruit, dragon fruit, and vanilla, but they aren't in season. 

It was really neat to see the whole process of growing and processing chocolate from start to finish. Sybil loves to eat the fruit around the seeds (the seed, or "bean", is toxic for all animals except humans, which is why the Maya/Aztec societies considered it sacred and special). We had a coffee/hot cocoa snack with beans straight from the trees we walked through. We also saw the tiniest sliver of sloth, so Sybil picked a stuffed sloth as her trip souvenir at the end of the tour, Slothy, who will feature heavily in future blog posts. 

On the way back to the lodge we stopped at Arenal 1968, a hike that winds through, on, and over, lava flows from the last major eruption of Arenal Volcano in, you guessed it, 1968. 

Sybil on the 1968 trail. You can see the dark black rock and large boulders that blew off the top at times, but mostly it's covered with vegetation and just a nice walk through the forest. 

We finally found someone else to take a photo of the both of us, and Slothy. 

We passed the afternoon hanging and swimming in their enormous jacuzzi hot tub with a couple of other kids, and then I dragged her on a quick walk to the frog pond at night. We saw a snake curled up on a leaf, and another red eyed tree frog. 

The next day we went on the hanging bridges tour at Mistico Park. It's a very accessible and short walk over about 16 bridges (many of them, suspension) that give you a pretty awesome view of some of the canopy. It was terrifying at first, but Sybil's boldness inspired me and I got over it. We saw coatis, lots of hummingbirds and butterflies, and some spider monkeys very close up. 

We were also treated to beautiful trees and flowers.

We wrapped up our time in Arenal with more afternoon swimming in the hot tub with new trip friends, a trip to La Fortuna to eat lunch at an awesome local soda and drop off laundry, and a night of gaming in the hotel game room (Sybil has learned checkers and chess...kind of...on the trip). The next day we were off to our next destination, Monteverde, and on the way we were very excited to pick up Mike and Parker at the Liberia airport. 

Sybil was an awesome adventurer the whole week, but the volcano wasn't the only thing blowing off steam in Arenal. Sybil was getting pretty sick of me, so it was really nice for her to meet other kids at the hotel and gave her an opportunity to play. 

Can't wait to get the band back together and continue exploring this awesome place together!

 

Soaking Up the Rainforest in Pocosol

I was looking forward to getting into the mountains and forests and experiencing a tropical rainforest, and frankly just moving forward since the last couple of days had been stressful and static waiting for news about Parker. So after hearing that Parker just needed a juice cleanse Sybil and I started our Costa Rica road trip. Our first destination was the Pocosol Biological Station, a remote lodge and research station in the Bosque Eternal de los Ninos (Children's Eternal Rainforest). 

Nearly every small town has a church at the center, vestiges of Spanish colonization. This one in Grecia is impressive because it's entirely made of metal steel plates and was built in the late 1800s when oxen carts were the only way to transport on dirt, and often muddy, roads. 

Most of our short stop in Grecia was taken up by a comedy of errors involving me trying to legally park. You have to pay for a parking ticket in specific stores that are listed on a sign near the parking spot, but there's no map or indication where these stores are. So you then have to leave your car to go on a quest to find one of these chosen stores (turns out, not close!) and then come back to your car to post your ticket in the window. But if you get a ticket while you are on this trek to find a store, what then? By the time we found a farmacia that sold them, they needed the license plate of our rental car, which I did not have. So,  dispirited, we shuffled back to the car and just quickly admired their church building on the way out. 

We stopped for lunch in Sarchi, a beautiful little town in the mountains that had a colorful town square with a playground and giant oxcart. 

Then we drove the 2.5 hours further to get to our rainforest lodge at Pocosol in the Bosque Eternal de los Ninos (BEN). They weren't kidding when they said you needed 4 wheel drive to get there! The Cactus Killer (our new to us 4WD adventure mobile back home, aptly named by Parker) would have really rocked these roads. 

The BEN is the largest private reserve in CR, owned by a non-profit called the Monteverde Conservation League. The land was purchased using the funds raised by school children from around the world (starting in Sweden) who wanted to save the destruction of the rain forest in the 1980s. Over $2 million was raised, which was used to purchase adjacent tracks of land to create a large reserve. They have a few rooms for people to stay in, a classroom, and a dining hall. 

We arrived right before dinner and got straight to adventuring with a guided night hike in the pouring rain. Sybil and I were the only ones on the night hike so we got to ask a lot of questions and go at our own pace. We only walked 15 meters (metric country, baby!) before encountering this red eyed tree frog. In total, we walked for about an hour and a half and saw: a snail eating snake, leopard frogs, masked frogs, toads the size of Sybil's head, freshwater crabs in the streams, and a bat. Even though we were soaking, it was really neat to experience the forest as the animals do. 

The view from the dining room balcony. We sat here for most meals (which were provided and delicious), and it was a great place for hummingbird and toucan viewing and for watching the rain in the afternoons. 

The first morning there we went for a hike to the fumeroles, a vent where steam and gasses come out of the Earth due to volcanic activity. There is secondary and primary rain forest in the BEN. It's all incredible, but the primary rain forest feels magical. No picture could capture the vertical layers going a hundred plus feet up, the verdant vegetation, the sounds of insects and birds, or the sense that you can feel the forest respiring around you. 

Gunnera insignis, AKA. "poor man's umbrella". Apparently they can grow up to 3 meters wide. 

We returned to each lunch at the lodge, and Sybil spotted a coatimundi from the balcony. 

Since rain is in the forecast pretty much every afternoon through the evening, this is what our afternoons looked like. I updated my journal or read while Sybil "read" Dog Man, did art, or came up with elaborate situations for her stuffie. 

The second day at BEN, we went on a hike after breakfast to a waterfall. We saw leaf cutter ants, peccary tracks, and some cool lizards. 

Waterfalls can get old pretty quickly for me, but this one was impressive. You can't get too close, so there's a mirador, or scenic viewpoint, to check it out. 

On the way back from the hike we stopped at the lagoon. Good bird watching and a great chance for Sybil to spend an hour building a sand city with the sand/mud. 

Cool mural on the side of the Pocosol lodge. 

Pocosol was awesome. Rugged, rustic, and not crowded (there were only 2 other people there, a wonderful couple of like minded travelers from So Cal who are soon moving close to Asheville, North Carolina to live off the grid). The trails were well maintained, the food was fresh and tasty, the accommodations were comfy, and the wildlife viewing and authentic rainforest experience was unforgettable.