Onto the Cloud Forest

This morning we left our beach paradise behind and moved into the Cloud forest. The drive was about 3 hours. The first 2 hours looked like this. Pretty easy. 

The last hour was climbing a mountain with mostly no guard rails with roads so narrow two cars can JUST pass each other. It was impossible to capture in pictures. I was just about having a heart attack the entire time while Trev wasn’t bothered by it at all! 😂 

Views out the window

We got a takeout pizza yesterday so we could have lunch in the car on the way today

Trev nonchalantly eating a piece of pizza while driving the craziest roads ever!

Traffic jams on narrow roads

As we were driving the temperature started dropping. It started in the mid 30s in Playa Hermosa and had dropped to 19C by the time we got to Monteverde. 

We dropped our luggage at our AirBNB but it was too early to check in. And we drove to our main activity for the day, a hike in the Santa Elena Cloud Forest. It’s called a cloud forest because the elevation is so high that much of the forest stays in the clouds. This creates a humid and wet environment so you get a rainforest type climate. 

Just as we were starting the hike we saw this coati run by. It’s sort of like a raccoon a bit. 

Unfortunately because of this sign, Owen wasn’t able to join us in the hike 😜 😆 

Owen bought a toucan at the gift shop

Lush, green vegetation 

The trail was supposed to be about 5km but our GPSs were tracking it as much longer. 

Joel taking a picture of a spider

We saw a few of these centipedes

I took this selfie to show off the shirt that I embroidered! 😂 

It 

There were monkeys swinging in the trees above us!

The cover to the Marshall Family album 😂 

Owen and Joel really enjoyed the hike. Anna felt it was long and wanted to go shopping at the souvenir shops to buy a sloth stuffy!

It was a super peaceful hike. The temperature was great (although I found it so humid I was still getting sweaty!)

Near the end there was this lookout tower. 

We were basically standing in a cloud at the top!

2 hours and 20 minutes and we only stopped for a 5 minute break to have a snack. Lots of elevation gain also!  My GPS said it was 7.18 km. Trev’s  said 9.5km. Joel’s said somewhere in between.  

After the hike we drove 20 minutes to this little trail that led to the Ficus Tree with crazy roots! 

Finally Anna got her wish and we hit a few souvenir shops before meeting Aaron, Allison and Rowan for dinner. 

Strawberry smoothie

Trev and Aaron enjoying some Costa Rican craft beer

Sunset progression view from our restaurant

This place had really great wood fired pizza! (Yes we did have pizza twic in one day!)

Last meet up with Aaron, Allison and Rowan before we go off on different adventures for the rest of the trip

It was really fun catching up with Aaron, Allison and Rowan and hearing about what they’ve been up to over the last few days. They had some advice for us since they’d been in Monteverde for a couple of days already!

Then we did a 15 minute drive back to our AirBNB over pothole filled, narrow, winding roads in the dark this time! 😆 

It was dark when we got here and it was hard to get good pics so I stole some from the Airbnb listing. It’s great!!

This shower!! 😮 

Here are some pics I took from the deck

Kids are looking forward to adding to this chalk board wall tomorrow. 

One thing that was so cool about the hike we did today was listening to the sounds of the rainforest!  These 2 videos show this. 

This video shows Joel nervously climbing the observation tower. You can see we are basically in a cloud here. It’s wasn’t as windy as this video makes it seem. 

Just wanted to show this a google translate app that you can use for writing. The original lotion container is on the left. You just hold the camera up to the item and look through and it translates the text to English. So helpful in the grocery store! 

Timelapse of the drive. Doesn’t show the cliffs 😂 but shows why Anna and I took gravol before the drive.