Day 2 - Friday, August 27
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Up at 6:00 am today. We had
breakfast at the restaurant, a buffet that is pretty good and
included in the room price. Our tour today was
Cano Negro and
it started at 7:10 am. We had to pick up other people from
other hotels in the area, and ended up with about 20 people all
together. It was a very international group of people. There
was a guy from Australia who lived in England, a woman from
England, a couple from Madrid and one from Barcelona, a girl
from Japan, a couple from Germany and a couple from Israel, a
girl from France who spoke four languages and lived in NYC with
her SO. There were about six or seven of "us" from the U.S.
Also with us on the way to Cano Negro was a man who grew up in
Wisconsin, spent his career in the military teaching small arms
handling and has now settled down in Costa Rica. Apparently
Costa Rica doesn't allow immigration easily, so every three months he goes up
to Nicaragua for 72 hours and then comes back.
The first part of our tour was a 2 hour bus ride up to the river, only 5 miles from the Nicaragua boarder. After awhile on the bus they told us they has something special to show us. We pulled over at a little restaurant and there the trees next to a bridge were filled with iguanas. They were huge and they were moving around. The restaurant owner would feed them and this is why they hung out there. I've never seen so many iguanas nor seen any lizards other than the tiny ones being so active. The meat
of the tour began once we got to the river. It was a
three hour boat trip
along the Rio Frio in a protected reserve. It is named Cano
Negro for the little canals that feed into the river where the
water is tinted black by tannin given off by palm trees. The
sky was cloudy but not raining with occasional blue sky poking
through. The river was very calm and sometimes reflected
the sky perfectly. The first things we saw were lots of
birds. So many birds I can't remember them all. W We saw Howler Monkeys but they were hard to take pictures of since they were so far up in the trees. This morning at breakfast we heard a strange noise and thought maybe it was dogs. It turns out they were Howlers. The sound these monkeys make is very distinctive and you can often hear them even when you can't see them. They'd howl at us when the boat driver rev'd the engine. We also
saw
Jesus Christ
lizards, so named for their ability to run across water. I
didn't get a very good picture of them though since the boat was
moving and they didn't stand still very long. The trees
and plants all long the shores were just incredible. Some
of the largest trees I'd ever seen and a density of vegetation
that is amazing. Plants grow on top of trees.
At one point Traci got called up front for to participate in the unveiling a very cool flower. Our guide spoke English very well and had to do the tour in both English and Spanish. Cano Negro is a boarder between a tropical wet forest and tropical dry forest. There is one place where there is a pair of Guanacaste Trees, one each from each type of forest. As a result they look slightly different and loose their leaves at different times of the year. Amazingly our guide found these little bats and even when we knew what we were looking for they were VERY hard to see. This is a great picture of them, and in the daily gallery for today you can see a profile shot that shows them hanging down from the tree. A great example of protective coloration. It was a beautiful day to start out with and we had a great view of the volcano when we left the hotel. At eleven thirty it started raining and continued raining the rest of the day. After the
three hours on the river we were fed lunch, chicken and rice
which was delicious and coleslaw with corn and peas in it, also
excellent. The chips were good too. While we were eating a
chicken kept running by our benches. You tend to see allot
of chickens running around Costa Rica. We talked to the
woman from England and the guy from Australia. Both are
teachers and are wrapping up the last week of a six week tour of
central America. The Australian has been all over the place,
Egypt, Jordan, Japan, Africa and most of Europe. He suggested a
great train trip through Moscow, Siberia and down into Mongolia
and China.
One of these days..... On our way back our guide used that superhuman wildlife spotting skill to pick up a 3 toed sloth in a tree by the side of the road, about 100 feet back and easily 80 feet tall. He had a telescope and zoomed in for us and we got a great view of it. Traci managed to snap a picture through the telescope but it turned it's head away at the last minute and then we ran out of battery on the camera. It was amazing to watch though as it actually climbed down the tree as we watched it. One person remarked "it's so slow" and someone else said "it's a sloth". I thought that was pretty funny. When we got back to the hotel we planned the other tours we are going to do while we are here: tomorrow morning a hike to Arenal, "take me to the volcano!" And for night we planned a hike in the rain forest to see the nocturnal life there. Sunday will be a long day, a trip to Monteverde. Monday morning at 5:30 am we will do a bird hike before checkout at noon. So far this vacation has time shifted us a great deal. We're used to sleeping in late and going to bed at midnight or later. Apparently last night the clouds cleared and there was a killer view of Arenal complete with lava flows, but we were dead to the world, wiped out from a long day of travel :( We will look tonight, apparently the rain doesn't stay all night long. |
