Sun, 1/30/11 – Lizz and Neil woke up to a scorpion in their sink this morning. I guess we will be checking our shoes from now on before we put them on.
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We were all up before 6 am to go to the Monteverde “cloud forest” first thing this morning. Perfect weather – clear skies – no mist – a bit brisk.
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There is an amazing variety and overlay of plants. Everything interdependent. Trees and vines climbing on other trees.
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One of our favorites were the strangler figs that grow on other trees eventually killing them leaving a hollow place inside.
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We also saw a hummingbird nest and the mother flew in and entered it.
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We saw both spider and howler monkeys. The guides work together, letting each other know when there is something special to see.
The penultimate sight eluded us – no quetzel but there was so much else to see it didn’t matter to us.
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Deep in the forest there was a beautiful little waterfall.
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This leaf is chewed by insects when it is curled up tight so when it opens the holes are in a grid.
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Our guide Rafael was excellent. He was extremely knowledgeable and had great English.
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At the end of the tour we went to a hummingbird “refuge” which was a place outside a restaurant/souvenir shop which had about 6 hummingbird feeders and dozens of humming birds. The largest is about 6 inches the smallest about 3. The large one was a beautiful violet saberwing and the littlest was white tailed at 3 inches. They were mesmerizing to watch. There were some other little birds (bananaquits) who had pretty long beaks who were pretending to be hummingbirds and got chased away by some of the hummers. Quite a bit of territorialism between the hummers dive bombing each other at the feeders and chasing each other around. We could get quite close to them and they pretty much ignored people. Sometimes you could feel them brush by you with their wings.
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We had an interesting (but relatively expensive) lunch at a Tapas place. After lunch we went to a frog zoo. They had teeny-tiny frogs up to large frogs that can get to be about 2 lbs in the wild. Frogs are one of the motifs in tourist souvenirs which works well for us since we collect froggy collectibles where ever we go.
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We went out to dinner at a highly recommended restaurant, Sabor Espanol. It was a two mile trek on a very bumpy, holey dirt road but it was well worth the drive. Lizz said her steak was the best she ever had and both she and Neil said their avocado/tuna dish was the best avocado they ever had. All of us loved it. The cook made a mistake on Joel’s order and came out to apologize to him but the fish/rice dish that eventually came was well worth the wait. Shawne had a great fruit/veggie salad with some of the mildest onions she had ever had. Neil had these very interesting chicken kabobs that had bacon stuffed with bananas interspersed with the chicken. It was all dee-licious!
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