Our last day in Monteverde was a little more of the same. We started out with another cloud forest hike, only this time through the other cloud forest. The only way you could really tell the difference, though, was by the muddiness of it all. The Santa Elena Reserve has a lot more mud and is not very well maintained. Probably as a result of this, however, there seem to be far fewer tourists and you can probably enjoy yourselves far more there than at the other reserve, if you can get over the fact that you're going to get muddy.
We hired a guide for this cloud forest hike, which ended up being a complete waste of money. First, the hotel sort of misled us regarding the cost, and it ended up being twice as much as what they had told us, as the price they gave did not include the cost of park admission. However, the tougher part was the family with us in our group had a little 10 year old boy who was acting very much like a little 10 year old boy, making lots of noise and splashing around in the puddles. If we had not already done so many other rain forest hikes and seen so much already, we may have been upset about it. There were also far more people on these trails, which I am sure did not help matters. We did happen to see a snake sitting way up in the forest - the guides had found it at the entry to the park and one of them had trained his telescope on it. Even still, it took some time to really spot it, as it camoflauged itself so well.
After the tour ended, we decided to hike through the forest some more on our own. Almost immediately, we saw more monkeys. I think we also saw some other birds and such, as well, and located a little waterfall that was peacefully rushing along. Overall, I think we did better on our own than with the guide, which was really so different than any of our past experiences. It was this little tour that reminded me that you could have a great guide but you cannot always pick who is on the tour with you, and that can really affect things. However, it was still a lot of fun and we enjoyed ourselves.
In the afternoon, we went on a coffee plantation tour. The other folks that had signed up for the tour did not end up going. So, we had our very own private tour of the plantation, and got to pelt tons of questions at our tour guide about Costa Rica culture and life. He also lifted entire sections from the moview The Bucket List to give us a brief history of coffee, a fact we did not know until we happened to see the movie on our flight home. You gotta love an enterprising tour guide. Overall, this was a really awesome tour, and a nice alternative to all the purely nature/rainforest hikes we had been doing. Plus, we got to meet the actual plantation owner (Don Juan), who is this really old, short man who does not speak a lick of English. He happened to be walking the grounds and saw us there.
And with that, we ended our Costa Rican adventure. Yes, there are gaps (like our trip to the airport where we got stuck for probably 45 minutes because a tour bus in front of us had skidded off the road) and things I probably forgot to mention (like the fact that if you use your credit card to pay the departure tax at the airport, it's considered a cash advance and you get hit with an extra charge by your bank), but I think it covers a lot of it. We hope to go back in maybe a year or two, but that will all depend, I suppose on whether planes are still flying and if they so, how expensive ticket prices are, as will so many of our travel ideas. On the bright side, I was really glad I got to go here while it was still economically feasible and before it became even more touristed than it already is. I wonder how Costa Rica will find a balance between its tourist economy and their ecological endeavors. Hopefully, they are able to achieve it because it would be sad to lose such a beautiful landscape.
We hired a guide for this cloud forest hike, which ended up being a complete waste of money. First, the hotel sort of misled us regarding the cost, and it ended up being twice as much as what they had told us, as the price they gave did not include the cost of park admission. However, the tougher part was the family with us in our group had a little 10 year old boy who was acting very much like a little 10 year old boy, making lots of noise and splashing around in the puddles. If we had not already done so many other rain forest hikes and seen so much already, we may have been upset about it. There were also far more people on these trails, which I am sure did not help matters. We did happen to see a snake sitting way up in the forest - the guides had found it at the entry to the park and one of them had trained his telescope on it. Even still, it took some time to really spot it, as it camoflauged itself so well.
After the tour ended, we decided to hike through the forest some more on our own. Almost immediately, we saw more monkeys. I think we also saw some other birds and such, as well, and located a little waterfall that was peacefully rushing along. Overall, I think we did better on our own than with the guide, which was really so different than any of our past experiences. It was this little tour that reminded me that you could have a great guide but you cannot always pick who is on the tour with you, and that can really affect things. However, it was still a lot of fun and we enjoyed ourselves.
In the afternoon, we went on a coffee plantation tour. The other folks that had signed up for the tour did not end up going. So, we had our very own private tour of the plantation, and got to pelt tons of questions at our tour guide about Costa Rica culture and life. He also lifted entire sections from the moview The Bucket List to give us a brief history of coffee, a fact we did not know until we happened to see the movie on our flight home. You gotta love an enterprising tour guide. Overall, this was a really awesome tour, and a nice alternative to all the purely nature/rainforest hikes we had been doing. Plus, we got to meet the actual plantation owner (Don Juan), who is this really old, short man who does not speak a lick of English. He happened to be walking the grounds and saw us there.
And with that, we ended our Costa Rican adventure. Yes, there are gaps (like our trip to the airport where we got stuck for probably 45 minutes because a tour bus in front of us had skidded off the road) and things I probably forgot to mention (like the fact that if you use your credit card to pay the departure tax at the airport, it's considered a cash advance and you get hit with an extra charge by your bank), but I think it covers a lot of it. We hope to go back in maybe a year or two, but that will all depend, I suppose on whether planes are still flying and if they so, how expensive ticket prices are, as will so many of our travel ideas. On the bright side, I was really glad I got to go here while it was still economically feasible and before it became even more touristed than it already is. I wonder how Costa Rica will find a balance between its tourist economy and their ecological endeavors. Hopefully, they are able to achieve it because it would be sad to lose such a beautiful landscape.
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