Arenal to Eco-Disneyland, erm... Monteverde

As already mentioned, from La Fortuna we bought a bus-boat-bus package to Santa Elena/Monteverde, a beautiful ride over the Arenal lake that saved us the 8-hour bus journey that nobody really does... We booked a couple of nights at a hostel on hostels.com - the Sleepers Sleep Cheap hostel. What a great place! When we saw the name online, we tought we had to try it, and what an an excellent choice!! The owners are a young family, Ronny and Joceline, who have 3 young children and are extremely sociable and helpful. For $16 a night we have enjoyed a nice clean room with bathroom and view, a kitchen, free internet, breakfast, private locker, and... well everything we needed, really. Bloody great, and it proves that Costa Rica is only partially expensive...though surely expensive.

The hostel

We got to Santa Elena at around midday but, as the bumpy ride and the overwhelming scenery indeed overwhelmed us, we felt too tired to start another tour straight away. So we took the afternoon out to have a look around and try to choose what activities to do - this place really reminds you of Disneyland - just the stuff is real. There are butterfly farms, humming bird farms, reptile and frog farms, insect farms, bat farms, a number of canopy/zip lines, hanging bridges, you name it. Oh yes, and the cloud forest reserves!! These are the Santa Elena reserve and the more famous Monteverde reserve, which is the main reason people actually come here, though in the end they all probably end up all sort of other stuff.

RANARIUM

The first place we decided to visit was the Ranarium , a fairly large place that turned out to be absolutely amazing. They have some 30 species of frogs on show, one more stunning than the other. On the way in, in the corridor, we came across a non-resident orange-kneed tarantula, another amazingly beautiful local creature, of which we managed to take a few good pics. Here is one:

Unfortunately, the frogs cannot be photographed with flash as otherwise they go blind, so we have very few and very blurred pics of those. We were allowed to flash them out on our first tour, which gave us great joy and satisfaction but that now makes us feel really guilty... Anyways! The amazing frogs. You have frogs that rely on camouflage and try to remain as low-key as possible (leaf frogs, usually green with some other striking feature, who are active at night) and others, such as the poison dart frogs, that try their best to stand out . This is a defense strategy that entails advertising a frogs toxicity with bright colours > i. e. do not touch me!! So you have glass frogs, hour glass frogs, milk frogs, bull frogs, gaudy leaf frogs (the front cover frogs of all) they are so perfect and gorgeous that they look like they are fake.

Below are a couple of our photo attempts...

Leaf frog at night, active

Leaf frog during the day, sleeping - yes, we went back to see them again...

This website has some nice pics that give an idea of what sort of frogs we are talking about >
http://www.waterfallgardens.com/lapaz-frogs.htmlhttp://www.waterfallgardens.com/lapaz-frogs.html

SANTA ELENA RESERVE

We decided to visit the Santa Elena reserve as opposed to the Monteverde one mainly because the former is much less visited, something like 10 times less. Monteverde is private and gets a lot of money and scores of people go up and down it every day, while Santa Elena is managed by the local High School and is less touristy and wilder. So we thought we could spread the money better and also have a better chance to see animals by going to Santa Elena. But we were wrong regarding the animals: our guide informed us that there are very few animals around: we are in the rainy season and there is little food around and they tend to stay at lower altitudes.. The only animal that we saw was a resident peccary ( like a small wild boar) which introduced himself by sticking his head between my knees while we were standing chatting... I thought it was a dog, till I looked down and got a real fright, which immediately turned into concern about the new colour of my trousers...Peccaries are not exactly the cleanest of forest animals.
So we spent the morning walking around in the beautiful cloud forest with the guide showing us tiny flowers and plants with his very powerful telescope. Quite interesting, especially since we could take pictures via the telescope which made it specially good fun.
So it was a good visit but we felt somehow disappointed not to see any monkeys or sloths. Later on the same day we booked a night walk at the Ecology Sanctuary - a place where there are banana and coffee plantations and therefore lots of food for animals - but even there we saw relatively little. We saw a sloth on a tree, a couple of orange-kneed tarantulas nests, a few insects and that was all. Maybe all a trap to make money out of tourists? We will never know, the forest is not a zoo and so each trip is different. Nevertheless, going into the woods at night is quite an awesome experience in itself.

One of our best telescope shots..

Just outside the reserve entrance lots of water feeders were attracting dozens of humming birds of many kinds. We spent about one hour looking at them - the big ones seem a lot more concerned about humans than the little ones.

JEWELS OF THE RAINFOREST EXHIBITION

On our last day we went to see the world's largest private insect collection at Selvatura - by world famous entomologist Dr. Richard Whitten. Thousands of insects, butterflies and other incredible specimens from all over the world, all collected in one huge room and displayed like an art collection. WOW!

While we were there, we also visited the reptile and amphibian live collection - more snakes and frogs and a very curious lizard that they call Jesus Christ Lizard because it is so fast that it runs on water!!!!

The Whitten collection

After lunch we took a bus to Liberia, more north-west, from where we are going to visit another National Park and the beach.