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…