Chet and Karen's Adventures--South of the Border: Monteverde

We caught a 6:00 am bus from Granada, Nicaragua to Cañas, Costa Rica. The trip went very smoothly and involved perhaps the fastest border crossing yet (only about an hour and a half!!). From Cañas, we caught a bus to Tilarán where we discovered we missed the last bus to Monteverde by about 15 minutes. We had no choice but to stay the night.

Tilarán was a quiet, beautiful mountain town. We read, napped, and ate Tritz (Costa Rican equivalent to an Its It ice cream sandwich). It was a relaxing day. We whiled away the morning and caught the 12:30 to Monteverde.

Monteverde is located high up in the mountains of Costa Rica. The mountains form what is called "The Continental Divide". Warm, humid air is blown up the mountain range east to west. As the air rises, it cools and forms clouds, which are ever prevalent in Monteverde. These clouds provide the water for the unique cloud forests which Monteverde is known for.

Our first full day in Monteverde we walked to a grove of strangler fig trees. Strangler figs are crazy trees! They grow from a seed which is deposited by a bird high in the canopy of another tree. The fig grows up and down using the 'host' tree as scaffolding. Over many years the fig completely encompasses the host tree, effectively strangling it, and the host tree dies. Over time the dead host rots away, leaving a hollow passage up the center of the thriving fig.

We walked around looking at the massive, hollow trees. They were breathtaking. We climbed up through the center of some of the bigger ones, making it up quite far.

While we were hanging out and climbing, a herd of coatis (Costa Rican raccoon) came through the brush on the hillside below us. A few minutes later a pack of Capuchin monkeys came to say hello. They were crazy monkeys, jumping quite far and falling long distances before grabbing on to another branch. Karen and I also saw some emerald toucanets (We didn't get a photo, but here is the wikipedia page), a beautiful green bird with a large beak (think cross between a parrot and a toucan). They were very noisy.

After the fig tree grove, we walked several kilometers to a butterfly garden. It was pretty interesting. They had a large swath of of butterflies as well as scorpions, tarantulas, millipedes, and cockroaches. There was also a leaf cutter ant colony in a box which you could look inside and see their process of farming the fungus which lives off the leaves they bring back.

The next day Karen and I (Wyatt had gone out drinking with a lady friend until four in the morning and was too tired) went to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. I had my student ID so I got in the park for a bit cheaper, but Karen didn't have hers so she had to pay $20 to get in.

The reserve is perched on top of the mountain and is constantly besieged by a mist and howling wind. The forest is not quite the jungle you would expect. It is much colder up there (we hiked in long pants and jackets for a good portion of the day) and the forest reminded us of the redwood forests of back home with all the ferns and greenery. We got to the reserve at 8 in the morning because we heard the parks can get quite crowded in the afternoon. The buses back to town were very sporadic and we ended up catching the 2 pm bus. Having so much time, we decided to get our money's worth and hike as many trails as possible. We hiked just about every trail that was open, about ~7 kilometers.

We didn't see as many cool critters as we had hoped, but the ones we did see and hear were pretty awesome. We saw this crazy bird, probably about the size of a turkey, called a Great Curassow. It was just standing 50 feet away in the middle of the path; it was pretty skittish though so we didn't get very close. We also saw a Black Guan, about the size of a red-tail hawk, that had made some crazy noises (Their call and wing click sound). We saw a very tame coati that didn't even care that we were there. The plant life was pretty spectacular too with huge strangler trees, super tall fern trees, and epiphytes covering everything (epiphytes are plants that grow on other plants without harmming or benefiting from their host like orchids and ferns). Some of the things we didn't see but only heard were pretty cool too. There was one bird call that sounded like a musical rust swing and we found out later was a three wattled bellbird (link to sound); wish we could have seen one of those guys but they were always really high up in the canopy. Later, we found out we had heard a quetzal but never got to see it. When we got back to our hostel, we googled 'monteverde bird calls' and were able to figure out what we had been hearing. The internet is an amazing thing ;)

The coati

We also did a free hike to the top of the highest point in Monteverde, the hill that is home to the TV towers. After the steepest hour hike ever, we arrived at the top of the hill in the middle of a cloud. Even though we didn't see much at the top, it was definitely an awesome hike through the forest.

Wyatt and I (Karen) also went to an orchid garden right down the road from our hostel in Monteverde. Wyatt grows his own orchids back home and so was stoked to go. The garden was fairly small in size but contained over 450 species of orchid, all of them found locally in the Monteverde region. Most of them were miniature with many flowers smaller than a thumb nail. Orchids are interesting in that they have neither pollen or nectar to offer pollinators, but need the pollinators to help them reproduce. So they develop 'tricks' to get the pollinators to come to them such as scents, very bright colors and the large modified petal that draws the bug in. It was a really cool tour.