Saint Elena (the town) and Monteverde (the reserve) are these cool spots way up into the green highlands of central Costa Rica. Saint Elena is nothing more than a couple of square blocks but is packed with small backpacker hostels and eateries. There are loads of ecolodges and several tourist "attractions" on the outskirts. Here, we're up around 4,000 or 5,000' elevation...away from the heat of the lowlands and up in the cooler, wetter cloud forest as they call it.
So what is a cloud forest anyway? Well, it's a bit different from the rain forest because at this elevation, your on par with the passing clouds in the sky (think Mount LeConte or Clingman's Dome for you Smokies hikers). Every afternoon, the heat in the valleys below builds and sweeps up the slopes of the mountains here...condensing and forming almost daily rain showers. There's constant moisture between the rain and the passing clouds and Monteverde is thus able to support a huge variety of plant, bird, reptile and animal life.
Joel & I are staying in this small wooden hostel. The thing with Costa Rica...you can snag single rooms (rather than your typical dorm bed) for dirt cheap here. We're talking like $25/night, cheap. That comes with a bathroom and a couple beds, but not much else. But hey, we're not here to sleep and relax. We're in Monteverde to be outside.
The first day here was spent at the reserve itself. You had to arrive early if you wanted to take the 2-3 hour guided tour with a local "ranger". These guys are amazing. They can spot a bird on a limb 500 feet away in dense vegetation. You'll see more wildlife in an hour with them than you'll see all day on your own. Our guide helped us spot several of the rare quetzals here. Only a few hundred exist and we saw several that day. We saw guans, an emerald Toucan, a few frogs, many, many hummingbirds and a few active holler monkeys way up in the trees at one point.
We ventured out post-guided tour later also, just avoiding the afternoon requisite rain shower and caught a great view of the entire reserve from the Continental Divide at a viewpoint with the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on both sides far in the distance.
On our second day, it was time for an adrenaline rush and so we hit up the Selventura zip lines that morning (). Check out the website if you want to know specifics, but basically, the "park" has 13 zip lines strung from platform to platform in the cloudforest. Some zip under the tree canopy, some zip well over the tree canopy. Some hit 40mph and one zip line goes over 500' over a canyon for almost a full mile! Joel found the zip lines to be a bit mild...but hey...he owns a motorcycle and is also an adrenaline junkie. Me...yeah, I got plenty enough of a thrill out of the 500' drop being held up by a couple of clips and a rope.
After the zip lines, we were finished with Monteverde and the cloud forest and off to the land of Costa Rica's most famous volcano, Arenal.
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