Ok so on Friday we tooka 3 1/2 hour bus ride from San Jose to La Fortuna.  Apparently times don´t really work in Costa Rica as it turned out to be a 5 1/2 hour bus ride instead!

The 2 days in La Fortuna were really good.  We walked up the dormant volcano (which we never actually saw due to cloud cover), went to a waterfall, swam in natural hot springs from the volcano.  We also got to see the funniest bird on our walk theMontezuma Oropendula, the call of the bird is hilarious - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5QX5cDUk0o . I´m sure I´ve missed stuff from Fortuna but I can´t remember what else we got up to.


On Sunday we decided that we were going to move on from La Fortuna and we got a jeep-boat-jeep to our next stop of Monteverde.  Again what was meant to be a 3 hour ride turned out to be slightly longer, this time however it was because of a landslide we had to go the long way around, that being about 200m longer! When we arrived we decided to do a couple of things straight away, in the afternoon we went on a coffee/sugar/banana plantation tour. This was really cool and we got to make lollies out of the sugar syrup at the end.  We then went straight to our next stop which was a night forest walk, we met our tour guide Danilo who took us through the forest and showed us some really amazing stuff.  We got to see an active sloth, opossums, lizards, loads of insects and spiders and a side striped pit viper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothriechis_lateralis) sitting perched and ready to strike.  I think Bec was most impressed by the leaf cutter ants, which were kind of nifty and also the huge nests that they make.  We then got back for dinnerat a really beautiful little restaurant, where the owner spoke no english, so the combination of that and our no spanish made ordering a little fun. We both had delicious meals and then at the end the owner and her 2 daughters came out with a cake and  to sing happy birthday to Bec in Spanish - turned out the owner of the hotel had told her when she booked the restaurant for us.


Yesterday we went into the cloud forest. We had the same tour guide and we were really glad about this, he was so knowledgable and you could tell he loved the forest and everything about it.  We laughed afterwards that he was like an excitable child whenever he found one of the animals.  We were again very lucky today with the animals we got to see white throated monkeys, the rare and beautiful quetzal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzal) we got the most amazing views both front and back of it and also another side striped pit viper.  Funnily enough we got up close with this one, about 5 in the group walked right past it (including the guide) and another member of the group spotted it, it was only a small one sitting beside the trail coiled ready to strike and yes Mum they are venomous.  We then went and had a traditional Costa Rican meal - Casado, we then spent the afternoon wandering around the town.  At one point we were very lost at the edge of the town, looking slightly lost a guy says to us "are you looking for is love?" we said no just lost, then he kind of dragged us on.  I thought that he was dragging us into his shop turned my bad interpretation was " are you looking for sloth?" and there was a sloth perched right there on the edge of the shops.

This morning we were waiting for our transport and Luis (The owner of the hotel) came and asked us if we had seen the sloth near our room. Of course not, right there in a tree no more than 10 metres from our room was a sleeping sloth.  I´m looking forward to getting home and watching it after dusk. We have just been on a jungle treetop walk through hanging bridges and looking at different types of Costa Rican reptiles.