The glass is indeed half full

Steve:

Five months of our ten-month adventure have come and gone.  How the heck did that happen so quickly?  Where has all the time gone?  Who swiped all of my time?

We are now on the final leg of our Costa Rican journey, basking in the Caribbean sun.  But I am ahead of myself.  I need first to catch everyone up with their vicarious living. When I last tickled my keyboard we were excising ourselves from a ditch and living with Wonder Woman along an unnamed hillside south of most anywhere.  That adventure complete, we said "adios" to the horses and met up with my mom and her husband Joe, affectionately referred to as Nana and Papa.  The rendezvous was back on the Pacific coast and we hung out at the beach for a couple of non-eventful but enjoyable days in Punta Leona.  It wasn’t quite Samara, but it did at least give Nana and Papa a feel for our life during the first half of our Costa Rican stay.  We then made our way inland through a town called Sarchi that is famous for being the craft center of the country.  Oxcart design hasn’t changed much in the last couple of hundred years, but the woodworking skills are quite impressive nonetheless!

Beach fun in Punta Leona

One of the traditional oxcarts, complete with a couple of real oxen. These two were named Hercules and Sampson. 

Absolutely everything in Sarchi is an art project including this bench on a random street corner. 

Even the ground itself is all about the art.  Scotty, energize!

Josh wanted this little dude as a souvenir, but we decided we'd make our own when we got home. 

With souvenir shopping out of the way we then parked at a super-comfy inn near the top of the Poas volcano.  The intention was to go into the national park and stare into the mouth of the beast.  But the weather would not cooperate and after three days of living inside heavy clouds that made crater viewing impossible, we finally had to give up that quest in favor of a new one.  Our new quest?  Gain as much weight in three days as humanly possible by gorging ourselves with fine cuisine.  We attempted to eat everything on the menu in the “restaurant” at the inn.  I use quotes because it felt more like we were staying at a storybook grandmother’s house in the woods and she was waiting on us and cooking for us like only a grandmother can do.  Only in this case, grandmother was a couple of thirty-something guys from South Africa who had better taste in music than grandma would.  The food was tremendous, and as we were nearly the only guests at the inn we got to sit on the cozy couch by the fire and play games while we waited for our food orders to be processed.  Only when the food came would we sit at the table and devour the latest creation.  It was actually quite cold up at that elevation (about 7000 ft) and poor Papa Joe was battling a cold the whole trip. So I’m not sure how much fun he had, but the rest of us thoroughly enjoyed pampering ourselves at the inn and didn’t much miss the unrealized sight-seeing. 

Daytime view out our hotel room window.

Nighttime view wasn't too shabby either.

Waiting for lunch by the fire.

First king size bed in five months and with an actual comforter! Luxury! Can you tell I really liked this inn? 

We did have one superbly sublime day that involved exploring a place called the “La Paz Waterfall Gardens”. In this Tico-style amusement park we basically got a whirlwind adventure tour of everything Costa Rican in one afternoon. There was some jungle hiking to view multiple stunning waterfalls, a must, of course. There was a bird sanctuary where toucans perched on our forearms. There were the requisite butterfly gardens where I actually got to watch a butterfly as it broke out of its chrysalis. I had to help the poor guy as he lost his grip during the wing drying process and fell to the concrete. Without my assistance he would have been doomed to a premature passing, I am told. There were monkeys who desperately needed to continuously hold hands with each of us, though they also wanted to pull Chloe’s hair out. That wasn’t too much fun for her. There pumas, and ocelots, and tree frogs and snakes (and lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!). It was all there in one spot. Why did we even bother with the last five months when we could have been so much more efficient by just coming here in the first place? Obviously, I’m just kidding, but it was cool to be able to show all of that to Nana and Papa so that they felt they got the Costa Rican experience in their short time here. So no volcano, but Poas was anything but a bust.

Yes, he is, like a dozen others at the sanctuary, quite real and remarkably friendly. 

The ones with the rainbow-colored-beaks were incredibly noisy. I guess they thought they needed to entertain us. 

Kapuchin monkeys have five toes (including an opposible thumb toe) but only four fingers (no thumb). They all wanted to hold hands through the cage. 

The cool part of the frog sanctuary here was that nothing was behind glass. If we didn't mind a little poison, we could just reach out and touch them.  This one is called the army frog for obvious reasons.

And of course, the requisite waterfall shot.

And one for good measure with the old fogies out the way. (Yes, mom, I'm including myself in that group, so don't freak out.)  Looks like the camera lens got a little wet on that one.  Sorry.

We said goodbye to the grandparents (both the actual and the metaphorical South African ones) and drove back to San Jose to deal with a dental emergency.  I’ve been instructed that this particular part of the adventure is not to be recorded for posterity. But I do need to say it: Got to love socialized medicine!  That issue sufficiently taken care of, we ditched the rental car and boarded a bus bound once again for a piece of paradise. 

The Caribbean coast feels more like Jamaica than Nueva Vallarta, Mexico (which is the town I equate most with our beloved Samara).  Most of the people who live on this side are of Jamaican decent, and the Rastafarian vibe is alive and well.  We are spending much time at the beach watching the surfers and smokin’ the ganja (well, OK, that last part is only true in the second-hand passive sort of way, I swear) and trying hard to soak in the last few days of Central American bliss before we fly away forever (sniffle).  I am diggin’ the fact that we are ending our time in this beautiful country just as we began it.  It is a sort of bookend-feel to the whole experience.  We are again in a small town atmosphere, with only our rented gearless basket-laden bikes to get around.  We are once again a hop and a skip from the beach, no jump required.  We are again in a large rental home with a good kitchen and a yard and stray dogs at our door.  Even the name of the house is similar; Casa Amarilla (yellow house) being not unlike Villa Blanca (white villa), the name of the house that we lived in last fall. 

The road to Casa Amarilla, our home for a week.

Casa Amarilla itself

The neighbors keep hanging around. They just won't take a hint. Hey, isn't SLOTH a deadly sin?

We have exchanged mosquitos on the Pacific side for fire ants on the Atlantic side.  We hear more monkey howling but less (though not an insignificant amount of) iguana chirping.  There is also some strange bird whose call sounds exactly like a human adult male running around the jungle yelling “Paul!  Paul!” each and every night.  I so badly want to find Paul for her (I of course am assuming it is a her that sounds like a him, though I can’t and I suppose I shouldn’t rule out same-sex avianitude), but the poor thing is probably really just on a wild goose chase, quite literally in fact.  So Paul is probably nowhere to be found.

Dozens of these guys lived in holes right outside our hotel room front door.

A cool mosaic in Puerto Viejo.

Where was I?  Oh yes, bookends.  The sun sets on the left end of the beach instead of the right.  Otherwise, things are pretty much the same here as when it all began, only the feeling is quite different.  Rather than apprehension about the adventure ahead, we are experiencing a few lingering regrets about the things that weren’t meant to be.  We never did learn much Spanish (simply too many darned Gringos).  The kids still don’t have the perspective of veteran Peace Corps volunteers, much less that of the wise-old monks that everyone predicted they would become as we described our intentions to spend so much time amongst the natives.  And I still haven’t found my path to enlightenment (just what do I want to be when I grow up?).

But regrets are by no means the end-all to our mindsets.  As the title of this post suggests, we are definitely basking in the glow of our own good fortune.  We still have twenty-two wonderful weeks worth of world to witness.  And all four of us will undoubtedly be able to look fondly on these last five months for the foreseeable future.  Alliteration aside (almost?), we truly understand deep down that we are incredibly lucky to have been able to take this trip.  Having the financial means, the time and the circumstances necessary to do so can be likened to the lining up of all the planets.  We get that.  And so even though we are sad that half of our adventure is already at an end, our cups still runneth over.  We have, all four of us, grown.  And I’m not just talking about Josh’s front teeth and my waist size. 

So what’s up next?  First, we take an arduous bus ride back to San Jose, and then board a couple of planes on route to L.A.  Next is a rental car powered whirlwind errand-run with a quick high-five to each of my brothers as we slow down a smidge on the freeway.  Then we are back on a plane and in Tokyo before you can say “kon’nichiwa”.  I wonder how many folks before us have been in Punta Uva, Costa Rica and Tokyo, Japan in the same week?  There certainly aren’t many Japanese tourists smokin’ the proverbial reefer with us down here…

If you want to know what comes after Japan, you are just going to have to stay tuned to this bat-channel.  I’m not giving the fun away early.  So until next you peruse the blogosphere, may I leave you with a final “Pura vida, amigo”.  Thanks for reading.

Stupid Gringos – Part 4

Steve:

We had to say good-bye to Laura and Jim in Manuel Antonio.  It was fun chasing monkeys with them!

OK.  If you’ve read the title for this blog-post I do have to confess right off the bat that I’m not absolutely certain that this is only the fourth time that we have pulled a bonehead gringo maneuver on this trip. It does sound about right though.  You see, I try to forget as quickly as possible when I have displayed a traveler’s IQ somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line.  So perhaps there have been more than three other instances when I/we have managed less than top-notch higher-order thinking, but I’m sticking with that as my count.  So let it be known that today’s was officially gringo-dufus-move number four.  What did we do?  Have patience grasshopper.  As always, before we get to the juicy part of our story, we have to set the stage.

Back in Manuel Antonio we left until the very last moment the deliberation about where to stay next.  We had three days to blow after Laura and Jim left until my mom stormed the castle and we had no idea where to spend those three days.  So Carol did some of her usual magic and booked us a cottage inland from nowhere and just a bit south of somewhere.  I originally balked at the booking.  The byline was “it’s all about the horses”, and if you are keeping up, you know how I feel about horses.  Plus, it was an extra hour and a half in the wrong direction from where we were going next.  But Carol is the boss, and she was through with looking for places after being rejected by the first dozen or so spots that she attempted to reserve.  So either I was going to suck it up and agree to truly make it all about the horses or I was going to spend the next few hours on the internet myself.  We all know how that turned out.

For Carol and I, the new place was really about the hammock and the view, rather than the horses.

The first hour of driving was cake.  The second was a bit tougher.  Dirt roads in Costa Rica aren’t really dirt (they are more a succession of large boulders mixed in with other smaller boulders) and they absolutely shouldn’t qualify as roads (more like wide deer paths).  We had just decided that indeed we were once again officially lost on one of these “roads” and about to turn around, when, ten meters ahead, appeared the sign that we had been seeking for the last ten minutes (it read, “No Pasar”, loosely translated, by Gandalf among others, as “You shall not pass!”).  Just beyond that was a sign that said “4x4 only”, mocking us as if we could have made it through the last five miles/half hour without four-wheel drive.  There should be a sign reading “persons who are pregnant or have chronic neck or back pain should not attempt to use these roads.” Just beyond that second sign was home, at least for the next two nights, combined with an almost instantaneous drop in blood pressure. 

Our first sight of our new "home" looked like this.

The first evening was quite enjoyable, despite the hundreds (no hyperbole) of bugs in the house whose only goal, it seemed, was to dive-bomb my face.  The view of the rolling hills and yes, even of the horses, was idyllic and ideal.  The next day and night were relatively uneventful other than the drive down to yet another gorgeous swimming hole in yet another pristine mountain river.  The cabin was comfy.  We could have stayed there contentedly for weeks.  It easily felt the most like home of any place we’d stayed since Samara (well, not including Gail’s place in North Carolina.) The kitchen was very well stocked for once, and the actual presence of dish soap and a sponge left me so giddy that I refused to let anyone help me do the dishes after each meal.  We were well-relaxed and quite refreshed; ready if not actually willing to pack up the next morning and head back to the coast.

Just chillin' at the local mountain river.

There was only one problem.  At about eleven o’clock at night, Carol jumped out of bed like a bat out of hell in search of her computer.  I was afraid we’d missed our flight to Japan or something.  Not quite so.  In the moments before dozing off for the night, her brain had decided finally to make a connection it hadn’t found the need to bother with until that very moment.  It turns out that my mother wasn’t indeed due for another day.  Carol had subtracted incorrectly or taken a square root when she should have taken a natural logarithm or some such issue with mathematics that escapes me.  But new math or old, we were suddenly the proud owners of one extra day in paradise!  It is a good thing the mistake hadn’t been the other way around, or my mother would have been waiting an awfully long time for us to show up at the designated rendezvous point. 

To make a long story short, or at least less long, we were granted our wish to stay one extra day in the cabin in the mountains.  What to do with such a gift?  Why, naturally, we would check out the local waterfall.  Every Costa Rican town has got one.  And everybody’s doin’ it…  So why not?

Well, let me digress by describing in some detail, the proud owner of our vacation getaway cabin, Linda.  She is a single, independent gringo woman of about sixty or sixty-five years that makes me almost weak in the knees with R E S P E C T.  She came to Costa Rica about ten years ago on a whim and decided to stay.  So she bought a couple hundred acres of unsettled land for a song and proceeded to settle it.  She had THE road bulldozed out to it.  She had the local authorities run otherwise non-existent power lines and plumbing the mile and a half that was necessary to the property.  She built three houses and a barn from the ground up.  She started three separate businesses and she bought over a dozen horses to populate the land and help pay for it.  She did all this alone (well, she had workers help, but the vision was all hers) without knowing much Spanish.  Impressed yet?  Really, I just had to write about her because she offered me free cocktails just because she wanted a drinking buddy one afternoon.

From the initial description you would think she was loaded.  Only she wasn’t, and isn’t, it appears.  She is just a whip-smart, hard-working, no-nonsense cowgirl with seemingly unending stores of energy and guts.  She is a very down-to-earth nature lover who has no idea whatever that she has more chutzpah in her little toe than most people have in their entire body.  Why do I bring this up at this point in the story, you ask?  Well because this day was a case in point.  She flippantly offered to “quickly” take us down to see the local waterfall since it was difficult to describe the route as none of the roads are named and the trails are not marked.  “No big deal.  It’s just a short easy walk after a quick drive.  I’ve got a few minutes to spare.”  So she jumped on her four-wheelin’ ATV and sped off without a backward glance and with me trying desperately to keep up in our city-boy’s 4x4.  At one non-descript point on the dirt “road” she stops and says we ought to park here because she is worried about us getting stuck if we drive any farther.  So we pull over to the side of the road and park perilously close to a ditch, just as she asks, leaving room for any locals who may need to pass by.  Then we hike, and hike, and hike a little more up and then down, down, down the road until we finally reach the tiny beginnings of an unassuming unmarked trail, which we then proceed to hike, and hike some more. In all it was over half an hour of downhill-all-the-way trekking.  After much pathway, that is sometimes so steep that we need to hold on to trees as we descend, we finally make it to the pool at the bottom of our waterfall.  Linda is jumping around on the rocks like she has too much energy pent up.  I’m sweating like a pig just thinking about that hike back up in my near future.

How many photos do we have of us in different water falls?  There can never be enough!

We jump in the water.  Linda starts back up the steep trail almost immediately to head back home.  Did I mention that she is at least twenty years older than I am?  In any case, we have made it to the falls.  Linda had said they were stunning, but we had seen dozens of other world-class “cataratas” in the past few months, and so we were skeptical that we would actually be "stunned".  The lower half was maybe fifty feet high, and the upper half closer to a hundred.  It was an absolutely gorgeous scene.  We tried to capture it with our cameras, but since the good camera was stolen (What, you didn’t read the last blog post?  Shame on you.) the kids’ cheapo cameras really couldn’t do the canyon justice.

Best shot we have of the two different tiers.  We swam at the bottom of the lower one.

Another angle of the bottom half.

About an hour of frolicking under the falls and behind the falls and off the rocks into the falls and we were steeled for the inevitable sweat-fest back up the mountain.  Knowing we were stopping for lunch before driving all the way home, I decided to do the hike barebacked so as to save my shirt from death by perspiration.  So I dripped and slogged and basically swam my way back up the hill to our car.  Have I mentioned that it is really humid in Costa Rica?  The kids were “dying of thirst” after having downed the last of the water quite early on.  We were all tired and hungry and tempers were a bit short, but we finally reached our vehicle and were ready to drive to lunch. 

Our car, on the other hand, was not so ready.  Sound familiar?  Remember the Alamo? (That’s a reference to an earlier post too.  Get with the program!)  Well this time the problem wasn’t the car battery.  This time the problem was with the operator.  You see, the four by four wasn’t able to go up the ruddy, muddy hill starting from a dead-stop where we had parked.  So we tried the next thing that would cross any gringo’s mind.  It was simply boneheaded gringo logic 101.  Why not let gravity help us out of the mud?  Let’s back it up!  And finally we have arrived at the point to which the title of our story referred. You guessed it.  Into the ditch we went.

You see, we were inches from peril on the left side of the car.  If I turned the wheel to the right, the left front wheel would go into the ditch upon backing up.  But if I turned the steering wheel to the left at all, the left back wheel would fall in.  Carol got out and checked out the situation.  Her assessment was that if I backed straight out the road would widen a bit and I’d be able to avoid catastrophe.  I think she was using that new math again. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame her.  Well, not any more than I blame myself.  It was my fault for parking so close to the edge of the Grand Canyon in the first place.  But I trusted her judgment and let fly.

So, now we are really down in Sh*& Creek without a paddle and with a severe case of embarrassed outrage with ourselves.  We try piling rocks under each of the wheels.  We try pushing the car whilst flooring it.  Add back wrenching to my list of ailments.  Carol has become so covered in muck that we can’t find her shoes despite the fact that we know they are still on her feet. We try praying to the gods of stupid gringos in need.  We try yelling at the kids, crying and simultaneously laughing at our peril.  Surprisingly none of these approaches helped us to clear the ditch. 

OK.  So do we hike all the way back down to the waterfall and find someone to be our angel of mercy?  The Ticos down there had all come from a different trail in a different direction entirely and weren’t likely to be able to help.  No good.  Do we walk up the road, all the way up the mountain until we encounter civilization in a few hours?  Not likely.  Do we dial random numbers on our cell phone and plead with whoever answers to send the cavalry to us even though we have absolutely no way of describing where the hell we are?  Maybe.  I’m not sure our AAA membership is going to work so well here.  Oh, we let that lapse anyway, didn’t we?  How about we just sit down and pout and sweat it out until Linda possibly discovers this evening that we have never returned?  Tempting.

Just as panic begins to well up and morph into a general acceptance that we will never survive this and live to blog about it, Chloe takes a few steps around a corner and announces that there is a house with a truck not thirty feet from our position.  I knew that.  I was just waiting to see if she could be resourceful.  This was just a home-schooling test of her street-smarts.  Yeah, that’s it.  Nice work, Coco.  You pass.  This time.  The next test will include some of Mama’s new math.

We walk up the long driveway and are met halfway by a man who is looking at us like we are surely lost puppies in need of something that he wasn’t sure he was going to want to provide.  I’m still shirtless and sweating so much that it looks as if I had just emerged from the waterfall.  Carol looks like she has just finished lubing up for a mud-wrestling match.  “Can you help us out?,” I offer meekly in my best formal Spanish.  “Our car… it is in a big ditch”.  He laughs on the inside.  I see it in his eyes.  But the rest of his face betrays nothing.  He calls his wife.  The two of them shake their heads when they think I’m not looking and they secretly wonder how the United States ever became a super-power.  They then proceed to spend less than ten minutes with their oh-so handy-dandy truck and their suspiciously convenient fifty-foot heavy-duty rope to pull us out.  We are free to go.  I give him twenty bucks, thanking him profusely and bowing to his superior manliness, but knowing full well that I am only reinforcing the stereotype that we gringos think money will fix anything.  I turn the car around and drive off into the afternoon with my tail securely between my legs and my masculinity securely back in that ditch. 

Safely out of the ditch and at the local restaurant which had panoramic views of its own.

But my glass is not half-full, it is overflowing. This is not just a story about travelers who really need to stick to resort hotels and all-you-can-eat buffets.  Nay, it is surely more than that.  It is also a story that emphasizes the triumph of human will-power over the elements.   It is man versus nature!  Indeed, it is also a testament to the capacity of the human spirit. One human being can and will assist another in times of dire need, strangers no more.  Bring on global warming, mother nature!  We shall overcome! 

OK.  I exaggerate a tad.  But the Ticos ARE unfailingly friendly and always willing to help.  This country is absolutely spectacular in terms of its vistas and its terrain.  But is even more so when considering its people.  We will surely miss them when we continue on to our next adventure.  From what I’ve heard, the Japanese are not quite as forthcoming with their magnanimity in dealing with outsiders.  I hope to find that to be an unfounded criticism, but yeah or nay, it won’t detract from my appreciation of the generosity of the Costa Ricans.  Heaven knows, we’ve needed every bit of that.

From Blue Rivers to White Monkeys

Steve: Hello blogsters.  Much has happened since we left San Jose the day after Christmas.  Nearly all of it has been amazing.  So a warning to you: if you are not up to hearing that the glass is completely full and over-flowing, and you were hoping for moping and itching for bitching like in my last post, then this post is simply not for you!  Run Away!  I promise to ditch the Tigger persona and get back to my Eeyore-self soon enough.  But not in this post, baby!

Rio Celeste

We have rented a car for the duration of our time in Costa Rica, so we can finally cruise the country freely.  With a brand-spanking new four-wheel drive at our fingertips we are footloose and fancy-free.  So where to first?  How about a river near the Nicaraguan border that is supposedly so blue that Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy has a winter home there?  OK, I made that up.  But we hear it is remarkable.  Two rivers meet and a chemical reaction among the minerals makes for an unworldly color.  No description supposedly suffices, but here is one from “costaricatraveler.com” that sure tries:

“In spite of the fact that my expectation, fed by excellent references, were high, the panoramic natural beauty that Rio Celeste brings to the table left me astounded.  The human mind cannot conceive of such a level of magnificence and purity until it has seen it. The name Rio Celeste, which means Blue River, is obvious in meaning but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of describing the splendor that springs from this corner of Costa Rica.”  Yadayadayada…

OK.  Let’s do it!  Inconceivable beauty?  Got to check that out!  We make the drive to a gorgeous hotel surrounded by lush rainforest.  We get treated to six gourmet meals there that completely blow us out of the water.  And that’s not easy, because we obviously enjoy hanging out in the water!  We lounge in a hot tub at the hotel. (See?, back in the water already.)  We hike through dense rainforest and point out both flora and fauna that do not seem of this world. We take a day trip to a natural hot springs resort complete with five different pools and a wicked water slide.  We come, we see, we kick a$$.

The only thing we don’t do is go to see the Rio Celeste.  “Why the heck not?,” you may ask. Because it is pouring rain for most of the time we are there, and the rain ruins the blue effect for a few days until the sediment can settle.  The three-hour hike in the mud just doesn’t seem worth it with no blue ribbon at the end.  So there will be no mind-blowing color for us.  But we still have a terrific time for the two days.  Seriously!  I’m not being ironic or sarcastic for once.  It is a great weekend.  On the day we go to the hot springs we also go to a big-cat refuge for injured animals and get to chill with a leopard and a puma and a couple of ocelots and a bunch of other wild things.  We also get treated to a “box lunch” from the hotel that is so good that we are actually fighting over each other’s food.  Empanadas and banana-leaf rice concoctions that knock our socks off.  These people can cook!  Who cares if we miss the supernatural, uh, natural phenomenon?

I ripped this of f the internet (crtraveler.com)

OK.  I’ve been writing in the present tense on this post.  I’m not sure why.  Just trying to mix it up, I guess.  But I’m done with that.  I’m going back to writing in the past tense.  Deal with it.  Or don’t.  Nobody is forcing you to read this!  But I am tickled that you are.  Somebody has to read it, right?  I’m not going to.  What a bunch of drivel…

Next, we to went to Arenal to meet up with our friends the Allens.  Mark and Michelle are world travelers, so a quick jaunt down to Central America is nothing to them.  Even their kids (Remy – 7 yrs, and Quincy – 5 yrs) are more experienced travelers than I am.  We took a “shortcut” as it was offered up by our host in Rio Celeste.  It may have been more direct, but the three hours on dirt “roads” could not have been the quicker way to go.  The views, however, were spectacular.  The local Ticos were looking at us like we were crazy driving through their town, a million miles from the tourist hotspots.  Maybe we were a bit crazy.  But the scenery was well worth it, and we were in no hurry.  We still made it to Arenal ahead of our friends who were coming from the airport in the opposite direction.  

Arenal is an active volcano that actually looks like the pictures of volcanoes you see in 2^nd grade textbooks.  Triangular peak, cooled lava flows.  So high, that the clouds obscure the top.  Awesome.  Check it out:

I swear the top is really pointy when you actually get to see it. 

We filled our nights with cards (Mark and Michelle are the only couple we know as pumped about Hearts and Spades and Bridge as we are, so I taught them a game I made up that combines all three) and we filled our days with adventure.  We knew we would be activity heavy on this bit of the trip as we had to show our guests a good time, but we need a vacation after this vacation with the Allens!  Here are the highlights:

Day 1: We hiked down (and then obviously back up) over 500 giant steps to view the La Fortuna waterfall, an impressive downpour that plummets over 200 feet into a pool of water and then splashes consistently 25 feet back up from the impact.  There would be no playing in this one; too violent. But there was another waterfall just next to it that was just as high but that trickled in comparison. It was beautiful in that the water hit rock after rock on the way down in a way that made you think it was something you’d see in Disneyland rather than nature.  The kids played under that one.

When are they going to put that elevator in? We're smiling in this picture because we're on the way down, not up. 

Here's the bottom half of the mighty waterfall.

Here's the one we played in for a bit.

Day 2: We took a short drive up to an observatory that gets you closer to the volcano than any other viewpoint.  We actually got to see the tippy-top for a few seconds.  This was lucky as for most of the time we spent in Arenal the clouds were so thick we couldn’t even tell there was a behemoth of a mountain right in front of us. We managed a couple of hikes from the observatory to old lava flows and to more falls and to a cool hanging bridge.  This was a day of incredible views and more of a workout than Jazzercise (my workout of choice, OK maybe not. J)

Literally hanging while on the bridge.

Day 3:  A hike through a national park riddled with hanging bridges, that are strung over ravines through dense rainforest.  One bridge was a full 90 meters above the creek below.  Many of the bridges were over 50 meters long.  A little precarious.  A lot breathtaking.  And then, another hot springs resort.  This one had dozens of pools of varying temperatures.  Some were simply too hot for me to enter at all.  But we spent the vast majority of our time in the one at the bottom of three-water slides.  The kids must have done forty trips down the windy one.  There was also a slide that was so steep that you supposedly hit speeds around 45 km/hr before entering the water.  It had a couple of slight turns and one hump, so that you spent more time in the air than on the slide.  I tried it once.  Recognizing my own mortality, I declined any and all future invitations to try again.  But my kids went multiple times.  I don’t think they understand the concept of life and limb yet.  You didn’t see too many people on that slide.

The girls are way up there on one of the hanging bridges.

Various and sundry mermaids at the hot springs.

Day 4: We had a change of scenery from Arenal to Monteverde National Park.  On the way we took a “Swiss” mountain train up the hill for stunning views of Lake Arenal and a little cultural history lesson in the museum above.

That's Lake Arenal in the background.  It goes on for miles and miles. 

Had to include the horse that was two hours old at the time we took this picture. He lived right on the hotel grounds. 

Day 5: We went ziplining through the canopy.  This was my fourth ziplining experience, but easily the best. There were fifteen lines in total over three miles through the air.  But what made it an extra large adrenaline rush was the gusting gale-force winds.  When on the zipline, all was copasetic.  But when on one of the eighteen inch-wide platforms at the top of trees that were often multiple hundreds of feet tall, things got a wee bit preposterous.  The trees would sway in the wind and we’d sway right along with them.  At one point on the journey we climbed up through a hollow tree about forty feet and then up another sixty or so on the outside of the tree using only a rope ladder.  Now I know we were strapped to a safety line that would supposedly hold us if we slipped, but that really didn’t help much with the stomach butterflies at the time.  Crazy fun.

Carol is a natural at this flying stuff.  Look at that casual pose while 100 ft off the ground. 

I'm less graceful.  Notice how much more the zipline is bent when I'm on it? I've got to lay off the frijoles. 

The whole ziplining crew chillin' in the trees.

OK, this isn't a quetzal.  But since the camera was stolen on this day, I don't have that picture. This toucan was almost as cool a find.

Day 6:  We trekked up and down a few miles worth of hiking trails through the pristine cloud forest in Monteverde National Park.  A quetzal sighting was pretty sweet, but the highlight for me was simply looking down at Bay of Nicoya and over the many layers of forested hills folding towards the bay.

Day 7:  Next up was a frog nature center where we got to see about thirty different species of frog both by day and then again at night when they were more active.  We have so many frog pictures that we may have to produce a calendar to be sold in a mall near you.  My personal favorite is the classic red-eye tree frog because his legs are actually skinnier than my own, and that is really saying something.

Does he know something I don't know?

Told you he was skinny.

Just hanging around.

This guy is called the blue jeans frog.

Day 8:  We had to say goodbye to our friends (Mark and Michelle and Remy and Quincy, not the frogs) as they headed north for a few days of R&R at the beach and we headed south to check out Manuel Antonio National Park with Carol’s sister Laura and her husband Jim.  No more card marathons for us, but lots of great memories to cherish.  The kids already miss their companions.  It is tough hanging out exclusively with adults all the time.

So now we are in Manuel Antonio.  We visited the actual national park today.  There was some hiking, but mostly we spent the time at the beach.  There were hundreds of humans, dozens of monkeys and about half a dozen raccoons, sharing the beach.  In fact, we have now seen so many monkeys and raccoons and coatis at this point that it is becoming difficult to get excited about it anymore.  There are many different species of monkey, so there is still some interest.  But the sheer numbers are quite astonishing.  We sat for about twenty minutes this evening watching the squirrel monkeys jump from tree to tree.   They would take flying leaps, hit a “branch” ten or twenty feet below on the next tree and then ride it at it struggled under the weight of its new found load. 

The park is teeming with monkeys, but the sloth was a crowd favorite.

These white-faced kapuchins were right outside our hotel room.

We saw dozens of these squirrel monkeys doing acrobatic stunts for us.

The only stunt this howler monkey does is try to scare the begeezus out of you.

There is also an itty-bitty fruit bat that lives about four inches from our front door.  It hangs down from the eight foot ceiling outside, all curled up.  Super cute:

Bats get a bad rap.  This little guy almost let me pet him.  He was maybe three inches tall.

We also visited a spot where they put out a bunch of hummingbird feeders.  It wasn't a preserve or anything.  These hummingbirds were wild and free to fly to Australia if they chose to.  But there were so many of them that you had to duck to avoid being dive-bombed.  The kids would put there fingers near the feeders and the little guys would just hop aboard to get the nectar the easy way.  At one point Josh had six of them on him simultaneously.

The purple ones were even prettier.  But less easy to photograph than the blue and green ones. 

For those keeping track, we are in our last few weeks in Costa Rica, making for over four months in this beautiful country.  We have one more set of visitors after Carol’s sister leaves, my mother and her husband Joe.  Then two weeks, probably on the Caribbean side, and we are out of here.  Next stop, Japan, and then Southeast Asia.  Europe will happen in the spring.  Carol just booked our return flight home from London on July 11^th, which is exactly six months from Friday.  Sheesh, time is flying by.  Almost as quickly as those monkeys…