Curi-Cancha Reserve

This is our current one room accommodation. We have spread all of our bags on one bed and are sharing the larger bed otherwise we would have no room to move.

I promised Doug we would go do something fun today.  We are really making progress on his e-learning math course, our accommodations have been sorted out, we know our way around…time for some fun.

Our choices in the immediate vicinity include:

-       Monteverde Reserve

-       Santa Elena Reserve

-       Hiking trails

-       Horseback riding

-       Cheese factory (sounds like home)

-       Bat Jungle

-       Snake farm (Serpentario)

-       Butterfly sanctuary

-       Coffee

-       Ficus garden (this is very cool… we already learned a bit about the ficus)

-       Orchid garden (also very cool… they can root themselves on the trunk of a tree)

-       Chocolate factory (who wouldn’t love this!)

-       Zip lining and/or propelling

-       Bungee jumping (NOT!)

-       Skywalk

-       Monteverde Sloth Sanctuary

-       Monteverde Wildlife Refuge

-       Cancha Refugio de Vida Silvestre

-       Children’s Eternal Rain Forest

-       San Luis Waterfall

-        

-       etc…

From Doug:

Today I hope will be fun, mom just wants to get her coffee. She is mad at me because I showed her a game I like called ‘fall down’ and I had a really high score on my iPod. Then I set the high score on her iPhone, she beat it by a lot then my very next try I beat her again. She didn’t like that. Well - “peace out.”

OMG we did not get the house. I did not call last night as I said I was going to as we do not have a phone yet. I e-mailed the lady I had been dealing with to ask her to call. I never heard back so this morning we walked down to the information centre to call. They were closed when they should have been open. Douglas and I walked the 3KM up the mountain to see the lady in person but by the time we arrived she had rented it to someone else. How’s that for bad luck, the house has been empty for a month at least. Anyway, as it turns out the guy right next door just arrived in town and is going to be renting out his place, we walked over and fortunately he was there so was able to show us the place. It is VERY rustic but very big. It is like an old cabin in the woods but he has two other out buildings. Everything smells musty which I am hoping will get better as it gets some air. Definitely nothing fancy by any stretch of the imagination. In fact it is safe to say that the majority of the people I know would not likely even consider staying there.

Oh I forgot to mention that on our way up the mountain we passed a guy with his kids and he asked us if we wanted to see the waterfall. I thought he said it was free but then he led us down to a booth where he gave us the ‘special price’ and charged us $8. So for future reference, if you ever walk up to the top of a mountain and someone asks you if you want to see a waterfall, ask if you will be seeing it from the top or the bottom! We proceeded to follow a trail 15 minutes down to the very bottom of a beautiful waterfall. We then of course had to walk all the way back up before proceeding on our journey up the mountain to the house. The man and his kids were no longer at the top so Doug and I joked saying how do we even know he worked there. Maybe he was just some random guy with his kids and now that he has our $8 he was heading in to get some food. We laughed even harder when we ran into them at the cheese factory getting ice cream!

 This was our hike down to see the waterfall and then all the way back up again. 

To the right is a picture of Douglas in front of a bunch of roots. The tree above has grown roots straight down to the bottom of the waterfall in search of water...very cool.

So that was the start of our ‘fun day’. After that we walked up to the cheese factory where we had an ice cream and saw the great big vats of curd…didn’t really get to see how anything was done! From there we walked next door to the Curi-Cancha Wildlife Reserve. Not everyone would think going on a 1.8Km hike through a wildlife reserve would be their idea of fun after walking 3Km up a mountain only to receive bad news but hey that’s what makes us all different. LOL. We didn’t see a lot of animals but the plants and trees were amazing. Douglas spotted an army of ants so we stopped to watch them for a minute. Within seconds they were all over my feet and biting with a vengeance! They must have known I stepped on their cousins. It was a strange combination of pain and itch all at the same time!

 On our walk at the Curi-Cancha Reserve we saw many Ficus Trees. The Ficus aurea tree is a strangler. It wraps itself around another tree and eventually kills it leaving this incredible image of woven roots that form the new trunk with a hollow interior where the host tree, for lack of a better word, use to be.

It is difficult to see in this picture but there is so much secondary vegetation in Costa Rica. Plant’s attach themselves to and grow on other trees. In this picture there must be at least 5 different types of plants attached to and growing on this tree.

In these you can see how the roots of another plant are reaching out and literally stapling themselves to a tree trunk.

This picture of a stone/clay path does not look very exciting. There is so much rain in Costa Rica that the path on the reserve gets very muddy and slippery. This part of the path has been built up by wood framing and filled with clay stones. Doesn’t sound very interesting but we passed the man whose job it is to manually haul bags of this stone on his back 1Km up the path to where it is needed!