Sunday January 30, 2005

This morning we got up early and headed for the Monteverde Cloud Forest. The Trapp Family Lodge is the closest lodging to the entrance so it was only about a one mile walk. Once we got there we had a look at the Hummingbird Gallery that is by the entrance. There were nine different species of hummingbirds there. Some were a lot bigger than the types we see at home. There were bright purple ones and florescent green ones. They were so fast that when they buzzed by your ear it sounded like a helicopter. They had lots of feeders out and we picked up a guide to help us identify them.

Click here for photos from Monteverde Cloud Forest

We entered the park at about 8:30am. It was $12 per adult and $6 for each child. We picked up our map and the guide pointed us in the direction we should go. First we hiked on a really cool trail to the continental divide. The water on one side of the divide flowed to the Atlantic and the water on the other side flowed to the Pacific. To get to the divide there was a “dwarf” forest to go through. The trees there were all so short because the winds in that area exceeded 50 miles per hour and it prohibited the trees from growing any taller. Mark almost lost his hat in the wind while video taping! We were already a little worn out by the time we reached the divide but there was still plenty more to see. We headed back on a different trail which eventually led us over a cool suspension bridge. The kids and I thought this was really neat but Mark was not quite as enamored with it. Finally after about 4 hours straight of hiking and who knows how many kilometers, we were back at the Trapp Family Lodge.

Exhausted and starving, we piled into our car and drove into town for some lunch. We stopped at Stella’s Bakery. The salads and sandwiches were excellent and cheap! We all wanted something sweet afterwards to reward our hard hike that morning and we headed over to the Lazy Frog gift shop where they made fresh milkshakes.

We were pretty worn out so we headed back to the lodge to rest up for a few hours. The kids enjoyed playing with the dog of the lodge out in front of our room. The dog’s name was “Puppy”. After resting and just enjoying the day for the rest of the afternoon we decided to head back to the cloud forest to do a “nocturnal” tour of the forest.

We grabbed a quick “Italian” dinner at a place in town and then drove back to the entrance of the Cloud Forest arriving just in time. Our guide was great! He had brought his wife with him that evening and she was especially good at spotting small things. We had been disappointed that we didn’t see more wildlife earlier in the day without a guide so we were excited to have someone who knew what he was looking at. We saw a tarantula in his nest and we got to hold a little white tree frog in our hands. It was so cold and clammy. Darby held it too. We saw ants, walking sticks, moths, glow in the dark mushrooms and fungus and a lot of plants and crickets! The tour ended about 9:30pm and we headed to bed. Our legs were killing us after all that exercise.

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