Rainforest guided tour

After a good night's sleep at the Monteverde Lodge, we wake up at the crack of dawn for our guided tour of the Monteverde Cloud Forest.

It's the Cloud Forest because the air condensates halfway up the mountain, so when the clouds roll in, you're inside a cloud in the middle of the rainforest.

Carlos is our guide, and he's pretty good. You can tell he's done this before, as he has great English, repeats the names of plants and animals twice, and has lots of random tidbits to share. We start out towards the end of the parking lot, and proceed to see the most rare bird in all of Costa Rica, the Quetzal.

It was actually pretty cool, it's a medium sized bird with amazing green feathers and a few blue ones too. We see a male, and see his long long tail feathers. Apparently, the quetzal feathers were used only with the most important people; Montezuma had quetzal feathers in his headdress. We didn't get a picture of it because it was still so early and the cameras weren't out and set to photograph wildlife yet. Oops. But we got a lot of other stuff.

Too many pictures to post, so check those out on facebook later.

After a few hours of hill climbing, lots of hiking, and a surprising lack of insects, we came out unscathed with pictures of a small waterfall, howler and spider monkeys, huge stick bugs, and a giant wasp carcass that a fungus was consuming from the inside out. Also, there are these strangler ficus trees that grow from the top of the canopy to the bottom, attaching to existing trees and tunneling down to the ground floor, then wrap and kill the tree they used for support. As a result, once they're big enough and the previous tree dies, they're hollow on the inside. We took a picture of us in front of one, and of the inside of the tree. All over the place.


This is a howler monkey. He has white balls, its quite silly. He and a friend kept pooping on the tourists to mark their territory. We didn't get pooped on, but the people in front of us did.

Amazing.