Into the Cloud Forest

On our second day in Monteverde (day after horseback riding), we were ready to go at 6:30AM for our morning hike through the rain forest. Not just any rain forest though; Monteverde (Green Mountain) is so high that the forest touches the clouds!

We split ourselves into two groups and each group had a naturalist guide with them. My guide, Melvin, was awesome, a Costa Rica Steve Irwin if you will, shouldering his telescope and running excitedly down the path after the sound of the gorgeous Queztal bird that the forest is known for. He would call the bird, and then set up his telescope really quickly so we could all have a look, and then take each of our cameras in turn and take photos through it. That's one thing that has been amazing on the tour so far - the guides have been wonderful about helping us get pictures. They really have this tourist thing down to a tee.

Needless to say, the forest was absolutely fascinating, with everything growing and breathing and crawling over everything else. Taking science courses in school, I knew that ecology was complicated, but it is only now in such a dense environment where there is so much life, that I felt that full weight of its complication.

Another thing that I caught myself doing was thinking of the struggle to survive and thrive in the very humanistic terms of good and evil. An example, our guide was showing us a huge tree that was slowly being killed by a second tree growing off its brances, and I know that I wasn't the only one thinking this way, feeling bad for the first tree. I had to remind myself that nature isn't good or bad, for it would be impossible for growth to happen without destruction. Random musing for the day.


Greg poses on one of the canopy bridges. Photo by Adam.

In the afternoon, we walked a series of bridges high in the canopy and then moved onto....ZIP LINING! It's a long, long series of steel cables strung up between the trees, and you're harnessed in and use these special gloves to brake. It was absolutely incredible, flying over the canopy with the wind at your back, watching the clouds settle over the peaks and the forest. Braking didn't work too tell for me at first, and I slammed myself into the platforms more than once until I got the hang of it. I was way more relaxed after the first couple of lines though.

Hopefully the pictures will describe it a little better. Neil and Suzanne were the heros of the day because they wree the only ones who brought their camera (we understood that there would be someone else taking pictures that we could later buy), so they ended up taking pictures of all of us, and on low battery too!

As a zipline surprise, we all got to go on a huge tarzan swnig, which is exactly what it sounds like! It was a large and rather scary drop, but really crazy to be swinging through the trees screaming. At least, until the staff grabbed your legs to get you to stop.