Zipline/Night Hike/Spa

HOLY FUCK WE ZIPLINED!!!

(I just had to get that out of the way.)

Today we spent the entire day on the hotel grounds.

1.  Breakfast, of course.

2.  Internet and watch birds at reception.  They have these hanging wooden platforms in the trees behind the reception desk and they put birdseed out so all us special guests can watch Central American birds from the comfort of the lobby couch.

3.  Zipline canopy tour, in the rainforest directly adjacent to the hotel grounds.

- Ziplining is super fun!

- You don't go that fast.

- Superman means that we ziplined with our bodies horizontal, like a flying Superman.

- Sean wore his Go Pro head harness the whole time, and he made a kick-ass video of our adventure.

- Our tour guys played little tricks on us throughout the course.  The best one was as we were walking up a flight of dirt stairs, Roy in the back told us to look out for snakes.  We giggled because there are like only three snakes in this country.  I'm looking up at the leaves and out into the rainforest and listening to the birds and all of a sudden I hear a low roar and I see the branch and giant leaves to my left shake and I SCREAMED.  It was Juan in the front scaring me.  

- One of the platforms we zipped from was a huge metal tower, like a radio tower.  It was so high up and it was windy.  We could see all the way to the ocean.

- I did not like the Tarzan swing.  At all.  In fact, I almost didn't go on it, but ended up doing it, and screamed, "I do not like this!" the whole way down.  See video.

4.  We finally had some rest time, which I spent sitting in a hammock and blogging.  At sunset, I returned to the room.  Sean took an incredible timelapse of the sun and clouds.  Sean also went out to get us dinner (pasta), which we ate with our fingers in bathrobes sitting in easy chairs in front of the doorway to the porch watching the sunset.  It was a stunning sunset.  Like the best ever.

5.  We took a night hike with our hotel guide, Ronnie.  The animals we saw included: 

- tarantulas (several)

- baby snake

- two tiny frogs TINY TINY TINY

- toucan

- SLOTH

- no animal is as important as that sloth that we saw

6.  Spa massages at the hotel spa.

7.  Pizza take-out and American Hustle on HBO in our hotel room.

Santa Elena Reserve

I'm going to mostly let the pictures speak for themselves.  We chose to go to Santa Elena Reserve for our first day of rainforest because the book promised that it was less popular and touristy than Monteverde.  Totally true.  We passed like ten people the whole day, and felt very much like we got to experience the nature by ourselves.  

We ended up combining four different hikes in order to reach the northernmost, easternmost, southernmost, and central points of the park.  The shape of the path that we took is kind of like a whale standing on its head eating a long eel.  If that helps.  

Our day in Santa Elena Reserve is probably the most well-documented hike that ever was.  I was taking pictures with my camera, Sean was taking pictures with his camera, plus also taking video with his camera and with the GoPro.  It took us over half an hour to walk the first 500 meters because we were doing an average of one photograph every 2.7 steps.  Everything was green, lush, wet, full of chirping, humid, and stunning.  There were a lot of excited shrieks from me and a lot of lens changing from Sean.

Some highlights:

- The forest floor was barely muddy, even though it rains almost every day.  So many leaves fall down that they turn into a thick mulch.

- We didn't see any exciting animals other than birds and gnats. Probably because we were talking the entire time. Plus honestly, we didn't know where to look. 

- We really were in the clouds!  And above the clouds, for some portions.  Even at the mirador overlooking Lake Arenal, we couldn't see anything lower than the ground we were standing on.

- We ran into another guy who was sporting a GoPro head gear. We immediately bonded and Sean offered up tips. I took a picture of the two camera hobbyists. 

- Thank you, Aaron, for the binoculars for my birthday last year because they are A.MAZING.

- We barely made it back before dark.  I'm sure they were 20 minutes shy of sending out a search party.  In hindsight, this was really poor planning on our part.  It's already kind of dark under the canopy, and the fading sun made it worse.

- The setting sun and rolling fog were images we will not soon forget.

- We both peed in a secret area of the park.

(I just now asked Sean if there was anything else to add to this list, like, "Anything that we don't have a picture of," and he snorted with laughter because we took pictures of every single tree that we passed.)

Like complete amateurs, we had made reservations to go on a guided night hike which began immediately upon our return to the hotel.  However, by that time, it was pouring rain and lightening.  Our guide Ronnie said that we could reschedule for the following evening because we might have a better chance of seeing good stuff when it wasn't stormy.  We took him up on that offer!

I took a shower, Sean went out to get pizza and wine, and we had a fantastic and drunken evening in our hotel room.  We watched all of our hiking footage.  We watched a horrible movie on HBO, but it didn't matter, because we were dry and wearing hotel bathrobes and snuggling and not walking.

Treehouse Restaurant

The Treehouse Restaurant gets its own blog entry because WE ATE IN A TREE!  AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHTENING AND THUNDER DIRECTLY OVERHEAD!!!

The restaurant was set up on the second floor, amongst the branches of a huge fig tree.  A sign at the bottom of the trunk proclaimed that this was one of the Top 10 Bizarre Restaurants in the world.  A metal staircase spiraled around the trunk to the second floor, where a balcony of tables was set around half of the tree.  The other half was surrounded by the covered part of the restaurant -- the kitchen and two rooms of tables.

We sat right on the edge of the covered canopy and looked out into the branches and the trunk of the tree.  A local band played soft rock covers in the corner.  I had a DELICIOSO meal of rice, beans, plantains, roasted vegetables, and avocado salad.  In the middle of our dinner, it started pouring rain and lightening and thunder.  At some point, a huge crack of thunder and lightening went off directly overhead.  Or at least, that's what it felt like.  Every person in the tree jumped.  It was scary!

Then, we took a bottle of wine home to enjoy in our hotel room.  The first attempt at opening the bottle broke the corkscrew right off of my tiny little Swiss Army knife.  We then tried the screwdrivers (both Phillips and flathead) to get the corkscrew (and cork) out of the bottle.  Sean the Eagle Scout used the curved end of a hanger to wiggle the cork around and pull it out.  Yum, yum, yum!  I drank my wine in the bath and almost fell asleep.

OUR LONG DAY OF DRIVING

Well, Day Two definitely tested our relationship.  (We passed.)  After a wonderful hotel breakfast, we got our rental car and checked out.  The rental car guy was really, really thorough, and we got a GPS, so we felt safe.  And then we drove for several hours, from San Jose to Zarcero, and from Zarcero to Santa Elena.  

Actually, I lied.  It took us another hour to get out of the parking lot.  First, we had to buy neosporin and water for the journey.  Then, we had to get a bite to eat.  "Spending all that money made me hungry," Sean said.  Then, we had to go back to the hotel and get a road map.  Then, we had to go to the bathroom.  "Spending all that money made me have to go to the bathroom," Sean said. 

This was Sean's first time driving in a foreign country.  This was my first time using a Garmin GPS.  Costa Rica doesn't really use addresses.  All the signage and all the GPS directions were in Spanish.  Sean isn't very patient when he is waiting for directions and I am apparently not very good at communicating driving directions that I don't understand because the GPS is still loading and the map just flipped upside down and now it's telling me to turn where there isn't a street and who knows how far 600 meters actually is.  Don't worry, we only had one fight and we arrived in one piece.  We will most surely work on our taking directions and navigating skills and going forward.  "Communication is essential for success!"  (That's my boyfriend.)

It was super cool to drive through the city and around the countryside.  We saw some small villages in the middle of the mountains and many neighborhoods of houses lined up on the tops of ridges with the best views in the world.  We saw many stray dogs, all of them little-to-medium sized.  We drove on the InterAmericana Highway, the road that stretches from the top of Mexico to the bottom of Chile.  The section that we drove on was two paved lanes, with a yellow line down the middle and reflectors planted into the ground- pretty fancy for Costa Rica. There were no street lights. 

Zarcero was really cute.  The main church was built in the Spanish style with tall, arched ceilings and decorations on every surface.  The gardens surrounding the church were totally normal until the 1960s, when the gardener decided to prune all the shrubs and trees into bizarre shapes.  It looks like Edward Scissorhands did a number.  There are arches and double arches and dinosaurs and twirlies and secret coves and all sorts of weird shapes.  Sean and I traipsed around and took pictures for an hour.  We got to watch one of the current gardeners give a shrub a haircut.  I excitedly related to Sean that I had the same kind of pruning shears in the trunk of my car.  While we were out there, it started to rain, our first rain of the trip!

The region around Zarcero is known for its cheese and cashew production.  The highway out of town was lined with roadside shops selling cookies and nuts and blocks of cheese and other local goodies.  We got some cheese and desserts at one shop, and stopped for burritos a little further down the road.  These burritos were small and flat, but delicious.  The bag of salsa that came with was the best salsa we've ever tasted.  We ate it with Triscuits that I brought from Trader Joes.

The sun was setting when we turned onto the dirt road that wound up to Monteverde and Santa Elena, and it was completely dark by the time we made it to our hotel.  Costa Ricans have purposefully NOT paved the roads up here to try to deter further development and crowds of tourists.  (That apparently worked for a while, but NO MORE.)  It made us feel like we were going to a really remote, special place.  Driving through the clouds was quite surreal.

This unpaved road, which we traveled on for almost an hour, was the reason we rented a 4WD.  We only passed a few restaurants and houses, and traffic was pretty light.  We passed numerous piles of round boulders, sitting in neat arrangements by the side of the road.  At first, I thought they were the remnants of a landslide.  But then several dump-trucks full of rocks passed us and we saw some parked tractors and we realized they were grading the mountainside and carting the rocks away.

We reached our hotel eventually.  Checked in, found our room, had no idea if we had a good view because it was too dark, dumped our stuff, said nice things to each other, had a quick snuggle, and went out to get dinner in town.

Photos From San Jose