Costa Rica Day 6-- Arenal

So, back to my journaling! ;) (Are you even reading all this or do you get bored before the end?) Ok, day two, Thursday at Arenal.

Ok, remember how the previous night, we arrived in the pitch darkness to our little "off the beaten path" lodging? And all we knew was that we were somewhere in Costa Rica with some pretty funny hotel staff? Well, the next morning, we woke up to this:

Technically, we literally woke up to the sun breaking through the clouds (since one whole wall of our cabina was windows) and the sound of howler monkeys and tons of birds! It was like my experience at Tikal in Guatemala all over again! Listen to this:

I LOVE IT!!!!!!

We all just kind of lazily got up and did our thing for the morning. I hung out most of the time on the balcony or the grass below reading my book, thoroughly enjoying the beauty of the morning... the weather, the surrounding beauty, the breeze. What a vacation! :)

We finally got around to packing up and leaving for the day. Although, I could easily spend time at the Arenal Vista Lodge if the whole purpose of my vacation was to do absolutely nothing for a few days.

Four out four traveler's agree... Arenal Vista Lodge was the place to be!

After we got checked out of our little cabina we headed up the road to their butterfly conservatory. They basically took us through three or four conservatory type places that had different breeds of butterflys.

My favorite were these bright blue ones but the things don't like sunlight, so they never held still long enough to get a picture.

In flight...

This was the best we ever got.

Unless you're Caleb... He was quite the butterfly charmer:

Or the tour guide...

He just caught one and forced it to show us its beauty...

The rest of us tried to be butterfly charmers, but pretty much only the moth-looking, super-friendly-to-everyone-especially-if-you-were-near-food butterflies let us hold them.

Becca and I thought our tour guide must have thought we were ridiculous tourists chasing these butterflys around trying to get a picture... but HE was teaching us how to use our cameras better and had encouraged the pictures. I got some good digital macros of the butterflys we saw.

My other favorite was the glass winged butterfly.
You could hardly see it flying around. So cool.

Our guide also taught us about how and where the butterflies
lay their eggs and what the larva do once they hatch.

The egg is that small green dot where the leaves meet the stem.

The larva are the white dots.

He spoke to us in Spanish pretty much the whole time since we all know some. So I learned about the life cycle of a butterfly en espanol tambien! Good thing I had some background context to help me understand.

The butterfly observatory also had a frog observatory as part of it... we saw some cool looking froggies! Some were even poisonous! (But I don't think I got any pictures of those).

(Unless this one above is the poisonous frog... I can't remember now...)

This one is a sleeping red-eyed green tree frog... you know, the ones you always see associated with jungle areas like Costa Rica. Too bad he's sleeping, because it looks like I'm lying.
But I'm not.

Another cool thing about the observatory is that they're set on a hill that has "the best" view of the volcano (according to them...). Not too bad of a view really.

We could even see some of the ash flowing down the sides.

I seriously LOVE this place!

We stayed there for a couple of hours and then had to head out to get some lunch before the canopy tour. Our little cabina hotel had booked us a canopy tour but after talking with the tourist information booth, we decided to go with a different company that had more cable lines, longer cables, one went over La Fortuna falls (where we hiked and played the day before)

and it included a horseback ride back. All for less money too! Good choice for us to switch over.

After a brief introduction of the do's and don'ts of zip lining (like if your hand break slips off don't try to put it back because the cable could severely burn your flesh or even take a finger off... and we didn't have to sign any legal releases to do this... hmm) we got geared up...

Which included these nifty hand breaks:

We couldn't help but pose like the Fonz in every picture, as evidenced below...

Anyway, they lugged us up the mountain on an old bus being tugged by a tractor.

We hiked up 400 feet to our first platform...

...and over this scary bridge...

and they got us in our harnesses and helmets

and sent us down our first cable!

It was relatively short compared to the other 9 cables we did,

but it was a great way to ease into it.

Man, there's nothing to it and it's so fun!!!! Just imagine zipping on the tops of trees like Tarzan with all this beautiful lush dense green jungle below! I LOVED IT!!!!

We even tried getting some video, and here's what Becca shot. She got tired of wearing her sunglasses and the first run she did without them on, (which also happens to be her videoed run) she smashed a bug with her eye like a windshield! Check it out!

(Um... it loaded sideways, so just turn your head to the side...)

Needless to say that was the only run she did without her sunglasses on!

Burke is a bit of a lightweight, so he got stuck on the cable a couple of times and had to hand-over-hand pull his way back to the platform.

I, on the other hand, was told by both our guides that I had perfect form and was getting the best speed because of it. Huh! Pays to work that core every now and again!

Or to have a buns of steel to speed me along...
Or maybe they were just working me for a good tip.
I suspect the latter is true.

The longest cable was 980m long!! Almost a Km! And the fastest we got going was about 50 mph! Seriously, such an adrenaline rush! The only sad thing about the canopy tour was that we only brought one camera between the 3 of us and the battery died toward the end and we didn't get a picture when we finally saw a TUCAN in real life!! :(

When we finished our last cable, our tractor bus was there to take us to a "village" (tourist trap) of some indigenous Costa Ricans, the malekus. They briefly taught us their greeting ("Cali Cali" as you knock on each other's left shoulders with your right fist) and then showed us all their natural crafts we could buy. I'm a sucker and bought one with a tucan painted on it to remind me of the tucan we never got a picture of. Then we saddled up and rode back to the cars.

It was a lot of fun and well worth the $60 we spent on it. Plus I got a free international call and was able to check in with Mom & Dad for 5 minutes!

Anyway, then we just got some food and headed back to Playa Flamingo. It took us just about 4 hours and we didn't have to stop... except when some kind of animal dashed into the road and we HIT IT with our car!!! We don't know what it was... we even turned back to see what we hit and the thing was no where in sight. Weird. Maybe we just broke a limb or something and it was able to scurry back into the jungle. But it was the size of a normal size dog and white, possibly with spots (that's what Becca says at least... I didn't see any spots.) She suspects it was an ocelot. Whatever that is. But we definitely got it good! Poor thing!

In case you can't tell, this was my favorite day of the whole trip! You MUST zipline in Costa Rica!

Oh, and I forgot to post a map...
it's pretty much the same map as the previous day, just backwards.