A panorama I tried to paste together—not too successfully—of the gardens outside our room at the Lodge

Third day of the tour, December 21

Rain again, at least in the morning. We again went for a pre-breakfast walk today, this time down to the base of the local waterfall. Only three walkers accepted Leo’s invitation this time: Sean and Mark and I. Again the trail was well prepared with cinder-block walking surface, but in all that rain, it still wasn’t a romp.

After breakfast, we went to a place where we would be able to see the signs of the devastation caused in the 1968 eruption of Arenal. The vegetation is lower, less diverse than the untouched forest, but after 42 years, there is a lot of recovery. One notable fact about the walk was that it was very wet and muddy in places. Once again, you’ll have to depend on Mark’s pictures for an idea of the area we went through.

There’s a reservoir in the area, Lake Arenal, which was formed from an earlier smaller lake by the construction of a dam in 1979. With all the water coming out of the sky here, it couldn’t have taken long to fill the lake.

At any rate, our next move was to cross the lake in a small motor vessel, while Sergio would drive the bus around to our meeting place by way of a much longer route. It was still raining, but the boat had good protection from the elements, and I could finally take pictures. One nice upportunity that presented itself was that we went beneath a dead tree that had a big iguana resting on a high branch, you can get a peek of him below, and a big and a small view besides.

As we sailed on the lake, I decided that no matter how hard it was raining onto the boat’s roof, it would be safe to take my camera out and take a sequence of pictures of our progress along the shore. The 64 pictures I took were separated by only a few seonds each, and I’ve arranged them in a kind of slide show: assuming that your browser has JavaScript enabled, you can see them all quickly by pushing the leftmost button beneath the picture frame.

Waiting for us when we got off the boat were two four-wheel drive taxis, which would be necessary for the bumpy and rutted roads that would take us to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. It was a fairly long and very bumpy drive, but fortunately our drivers were skilled and knew the road well.

Lunch was late, after all that traveling, and we were the only patrons at the restaurant, where I had a nice lasagna, much less loaded with tomato than the dish is at home, and a welcome change.

But now we were in Monteverde, in the famous “cloud forest” that we had, to a great extent, made the trip to see and experience. For the next few days, we would be treated to wonderful sights of the lushest possible vegetation.

At any rate, from the restaurant, we walked directly to the ecopreserve. There was little threat of rain, and finally I took my camera outdoors. As we walked along the trail, Leo pointed out a sight we would see many times afterward: leaf-cutter ants. These snip off corners of leaves—only certain species of greenery will do—and take them home where a special mold acts on them before the product can be used as food for the colony. They’re there in the left column to the right (top, big image, small; middle, big image, small; bottom, big image, small). In the right column, two shots of what the trail looked like in this superduper rain forest (top, big image, small; bottom big image, small).

Around the same time, we also saw a solitary army ant. My one picture of it is very poor, so you won’t see it here, but later we had a rather unfortunate encounter with these creatures. We walked through an area where there were a lot of them, and without knowing it, most of us picked some of them up. All except Mark, that is, who claims that his hiking pants were advertised to contain an insect repellent. I got around half a dozen of them, I estimated, but I felt every one of them as it bit me. They don’t seem to sting: their mischief seems to be mechanical rather than chemical. But Neal and Judy got worse doses than the rest of us, and Judy even had to retire to the privacy of a distant part of the trail to shake her clothes out.

To the left, two more pictures of the trail: the upper picture is of the same Ficus tree that the kids were climbing in the far right picture previously (big image, small)—in fact you can see the feet of one of them towards the top of the picture. You can also see Leo, Neal and Lin over at the right. Below it is another view of the trail (big image, small).

We walked along to a viewing platform where I could get a group shot. Unfortunately, Joan had stayed behind—or maybe fortunately for her, since she thereby was not subjected to the fierce attentions of the army ants. Anyhow, there all the others are above: Mark, Leo, Lin, Sean, Neal, and Judy. (Big image, small.)

A pasted-together view of what we saw off the viewing platform

The view in a somewhat different direction: note the evidence of the two landslides in the leftmost panel.

Our hotel was El Establo, very large and comfortable. The room was on the second floor, and had a nice view out onto a lawn where I saw a coati promenading one morning. Didn’t ever get a picture of one of these, unfortunately. This first night, the towel origami was limited to face-cloths that had been twisted into swans; for some reason I didn’t photograph them.

Dinner was at a nice Italian restaurant called “Tramonti”. I think that the choices I made for dishes were a little less wise than the others’, so I’ll leave it to Mark to describe the meal. From there, back to our hotel.