The Trek to Monteverde – Plus a Sloth Sighting!

Our first few days in Santa Elena have been extremely relaxing, we have been awakened each morning by birds calling to one another and roosters crowing. We have a tree right outside our window that often has hummingbirds flitting back and forth through its flowers. There is a beautiful green bird that perches outside our window that we keep meaning to ask about (Toucan Sam, perhaps?). So we sit, watching the birds and looking for sloths while we wake up and enjoy our coffee. While the food here is comparable in price to what we would pay in the US, the coffee is much cheaper, and much tastier. One of the first things that we have to do in the morning is turn on the hot water heater and let it heat up for an hour before showering. Once we are fully awake and the hot water is ready we shower and get ready for our day! Yesterday we explored Santa Elena, a triangle shaped town with many hostels, souvenir shops and excursion outfitters. We practiced our Spanish at a restaurant serving “comida tipica” and learned about a wonderful dish called “casados”- a typical lunch of rice, beans, a little bit of meat (chicken, beef or pork), tomato/lettuce salad and fried plantains- an extremely filling and delicious lunch!

This morning as we were sitting out our porch, drinking coffee we heard a loud, “bang!” then “bang! bang, bang! crack, BANG!!” We looked at each other, alarmed and wondering what the noise could have been, it was very loud and very close… our host Manolo came running from his house, past our cabina and along the dirt road behind us. We put on shoes and quickly followed. A massive tree, rain soaked and heavy from the extra water, had toppled over, not 50 yards from our cabina! If we were not awake before, that certainly did the trick. So we got dressed and headed out into the world! Today we walked all the way to Monteverde and while Google Maps does not seem to like this area of the world, or have any idea where we are at any given time, we cannot report on the actual distance between the two cities, but we put a rough estimate at around 1,000 miles, uphill both ways. Our actual estimate is about 3 miles from our cabina to Monteverde, but our calves are screaming that it was more!  It is an amazing walk, everywhere you look is so green, and the mountains and the clouds are everywhere, but it is up some crazy steep hills, most of which do not have sidewalks!

On our walk we meandered throughout Monteverde and found access to hiking trails, a bakery (yes, we stopped for a snack), art galleries, restaurants and a co-op. We stopped to have lunch at the tiny, un-named restaurant behind the co-op, and it was phenomenal! They hand made the corn tortillas which had some kind of amazing fresh cheese on them, mango agua fresca and a casado with more of the cheese, vegetables, rice, beans and a plantain. It was an amazing meal.

 

We meandered our way back to the cabina, stopping at art galleries and taking little jaunts through the jungle and then made a quick stop at the Super Compro to get some more veggies and peanut butter- we walked up and down the aisles at two different grocery stores and were amazed that we could not find peanut butter!! So, lesson learned- if you come to Monteverde and want peanut butter, bring your own! That is not the only lesson we have learned in the short time we have been in Monteverde, here are a few more:

Things we have learned about Costa Rica so far

• Toilet paper is thrown into the trash can, not flushed down the toilet (apparently the plumbing is unable to handle it and our Canadian host suspects that the toilet paper is also made differently here. Either way, it is a huge adjustment!)
• Monteverde has a Sister City, and it’s Estes Park, Colorado (of course!). They have similar altitudes, both survive mainly on tourism, the birds from Estes Park even winter here!
• The average humidity is between 74-97% (For comparison: the average relative humidity for OKC ranges between 57-80% and Denver weighs in with a whopping 40-67%)

Also- we saw our first sloth!! It was asleep and curled into a ball of fur, but it was still very exciting for us!!