Monteverde

The second place I took my parents to was Monteverde, a remote cloud rainforest, known for its extremely dense foliage. (Taylor drove back to the city to prepare for the start of his classes so he did not join.) To get from Arenal to Monteverde we took a jeep-boat-jeep ride through the Costa Rican country-side, which was pretty rough to say the least.

Monteverde is an interesting place. It was actually founded by a group of Quakers from the U.S. who took a religious stand to not participate in any war and left the U.S. in the 40's choosing Costa Rica as their home since Costa Rica had no army. The rainforest in the area was partially inhabited by many aboriginal peoples, and instead of segregating with them, they combined the two cultures, and intermarried. Since that time many quakers still inhabit the area, but they have donated much of their rain-forest lands for biological reserves, including the Monteverde Cloud Rain-forest National Park.

For our major hike, we decided to hire a guide....and she was amazing. She could do all the bird calls for the birds in the area exactly, so that they would come find us, and she would pick out things that we would have never had seen without her including a baby viper snake on a tree (very venomous and endangered), a sloth, and the famed quetzal bird (endangered and beautiful.)

As I mentioned before, Monteverde is also very eco-friendly. Our hotel, actually had recycling trash cans in each room. Also, the hall lights were motion censored so that electricity is saved and much of that energy was self produced at the lodge. Now how would they make this energy for a lodge out in the middle of no where, you ask? Well, by recycling your pooh of course! All organic waste form the lodge is dumped into a bio-digestor below the ground, where bacteria eats away at it producing gas that helps supply the lodge with energy. Crazy huh?

Here are some photos from our eco-adventure.