Monteverde-- Green Mountain. Se parece Vermont, pienso yo. Tiene el mismo significado. Montañas verdes, árboles en todo lado. Pero, los carreteras son terribles! Bump, bump, bump!

It looks like Vermont, I think. It has the same meaning. Green mountains, trees everywhere. But the roads are terrible!!

The mini bus that we took from the boat to the town Santa Elena, which is really the --commerical center-- of the area, was fine, but the roads themselves were barely roads. In the beginning, it was like a wide, rocky path, with every large rocks maybe about the size of a football.

We arrived at our cabinas. Maribel had made some friends in the bus and most of us stayed at the same place. Monteverde, clearly, is in the mountains. Hence, it is much cooler than other parts in Costa Rica. At night, it was a nice cold temperature. We started by going to a snake museum that would come in handy before the week was over! That evening, we went on a Noctural tour. This was one of the highlights of the week. We saw all sorts of animals, and in the dark with flashlights. We saw a tucan with a colorful beak just chilling in the branches, a sloth up in a tree, a porcupine sleeping inside the trunk of a strangler tree, two tarantulas (massive and very up close!), and tiny transparent frog. We were lucky enough to be not even 10 feet from an owl. And the star of the show was a venimous snake. I do not remember the name of it, but it is a brilliant color of green with a yellow stripe on the side. I got some great video of it--national geographic style!!

The next day, we headed out for the canopy tour, zip line. It was really great, not too scary and provided some nice views of the forests. Maribel's favorite thing was the tarzan swing, and when I went for the drop on the swing, I screamed like a girl. Go figure.

In the afternoon, we hiked down a small trail to a small waterfall--Mari stepped on a snake on her way down. Poor girl, she was very cautious and hypothesizing the whole way up what we would do if she got bit. "We would still have time for you to run to get help, so you just run if anything happens..."

In Monteverde, there is a cheese factory that was established by a group of Alabama post office worker Quakers in the early 1950s. They wanted to be in a place of peace, and Costa Rica had just abolished their army in 1948. it was idylic for people who wanted to leave the US because of the draft. So, we went on a tour of the factory. That night, we went to dinner with our friends and went to a concert of a cumbia group called Simba and I even learned so cumbia dancing! We had our friends with us: they were our bodyguards!

The next morning, we woke up at 5 am and were on a bus at 6 am for our first leg to Parque nacional manuel antonio. We were on the look out for monkeys!