Beaches and clouds

Our first destination across the border was to a beach in Guanacaste. It was beautiful. Although the town itself was very touristy and expensive, we enjoyed the Vitamin D and warmth, falling asleep to the sound of the ocean, and ¨pura vida¨atmosphere of Costa Rica. (Pura vida is another one of those catch all frases. Basically it means It´s all goood. It´s a common response when someone asks How are you. They also say it as you are leaving a store. It´s everywhere.)



From the warmth of the Pacific Coast we traveled to Monteverde - a cloud forest. It was beautiful, but as you would guess, very cloudy. It also rained for most of the time we were there which made it very chilly. Enough to make even a hearty Minnesotan muy frio. One of the highlights was a guided tour through a trail with hanging bridges. It was great to be surrounded by so much greenery. According to one guide, if you breath the air there for a few hours, it adds 10 years to your life. We should be good to go. In addition to beautiful plants and trees, we saw monkeys, lizards, butterflies, spiders and a sloth.



We decided to do a zip-line/canopy tour because it´d be beautiful to see that kind of cloud forest while dangling from a cable. Unfortunately we were inside the cloud for a majority of the time. This made for a very eerie sensation....flying through the air not able to see much more than a few feet infront of you. There was also some kind of storm that had moved in from the Caribean side. Our guide assured us that if the wind was at least 20 mphs less than the cut off point when they stop taking groups out ziplining. This made for a very brisk wait for your turn on the cable.

In spite of everything we were able to see the trees below every once in a while which was great. Also, it was a pretty unique experience to do a canopy tour in a cloud. For future reference though, they say that Jan - April is a better time to visit the cloud forest.

To give you an idea of what the scenery was like, here´s a picture of me at the continental divide. We were able to go for a beautiful hike our last morning in Monteverde. Inside the forest it was much more sheltered and scenic.