Here are a few teaser photos from our honeymoon in Costa Rica. :)
The top one of me is on the beach at our hotel, with black sands and slightly overcast skies.
The second is one of MANY tropical, colorful flowers in the area.
The third is Nate (shouldn't he look happier?..hehe...) in front of the hotel's sign. It was called Banana Azul and is just outside Puerto Viejo in SE Costa Rica.
The 4th is, well, Nate and I.
and
the last one is my FIRST cup of Costa Rican coffee (major, major domestic product of CR) and I even found a cup with the Costa Rican flag on it. Mmmmmm... "Tico" coffee...!
As kind of a "Part 2" of my posting for our adventure, here goes.
After the previously mentioned adventures, Nate and I did alot of swimming, relaxing, reading, loafing, bicycling to town, and a couple more local adventures. I'll start with the "less satisfying" adventure, the one which caused the one and only 'meltdown' of the trip. We started off with this great idea of going to another 'playa' or beach a few kilometers away one day which we'd heard had beautiful blue, clear ocean and white sands. We took a cab to this wonderful beach and promptly plopped ourselves down on a good bit of beach. We spent a couple hours just lying there, and occasionally getting up to swim and cool off. I spent alot of time staring at, playing with, taking pictures of, and following lil beach crabs around my towel while laying there. The afternoon was all fine and well, except that we apparently had picked the hottest day to go. After a while, it was just toooo hot, I was baking, and needed to get out of the sun, sit, and cool off. And no, swimming wasn't even really cooling us off anymore at this point. So we decided to walk to the next town over, where we had intended to go next to swim and to end up for dinner, and where our cab would pick us up afterwards.
Well, we ended up walking more than a few kilometers by road and beach, which didn't seem to end. Finally, to make a long, cranky story short, we found a lil convenience store, had some ice cream and OJ and waited on some steps while watching the numerous stray dogs sniff hineys for 45 minutes, until the restaurant we wanted to eat at would open. Thank goodness the food was fabulous at 'Jungle Love,' or our incredibly long and exhausting and hot and sticky and sandy day would have been a lil too adventurous. Freash tuna steaks and the chicken special healed all our weariness and wounds of the day. To top it off, showering that night when we returned to our hotel was the best shower I could remember in a while. Stickiness, dampness, dirt, and sand (in every crack and orifice) disappeared.
Better than this adventure were our adventures to the canopy zip-line tour and one of the National Parks in our area. Early in the second week, we decided it was a good day to take off for one of the activities we had been waiting for: the jungle canopy tour! This is a favorite local touristy activity which involved a lil bit of grit, lack of fear of heights, ability to hike a lil bit, and no fear of creatures - whether bugs or bats or monkeys. I knew I would be nervous about this, and I was, but after the first zipline, I was hooked. The canopy tour consists of a series of wooden platforms connected by zipline wires through varying heights of high elevation jungle canopy (canopy = the tops of jungle trees the cover the jungle below, e.g. where the monkeys tend to hang out, and where the views are spectacular). We were strapped into sitting harnesses, kind of like climbing harnesses, which hook onto a pulley that hangs on the wire. Simply hook in, sit, and zip! Some are faster or longer than others, and there is some hiking between some platforms, but mostly it is platform to platform. We were able to take pictures on the platforms (only -- none while "zipping" because you need both hands to guide you so you dont spin around), and we also saw and heard many animals and weird plants. There were lizards and fruit bats, and "bullet" ants, which according to one of the guides gives "5-day pain," as in, you feel like a bullet has gone through you at the bite. Also, those ants were more like mutants because they were larger than some roaches! Grosss! Anyway, we steered clear of those. We were really hoping to see monkeys in the canopy, but we didn't. However, we did HEAR them. The Howler Monkeys, a common species in the area, can be heard often for miles and we came fairly close to a band of them and were able to record some of their sounds on our camera. When we finally did see them on another adventure, it was hard to believe such a huge, deep sound could come from such a small monkey.
The canopy tour was defintely worth it, despite any initial hesitancy. It was fun, educational, beautiful, and more!
Another adventure Nate and I went on was the Cahuita National Park, several kilometers north along the coast from Puerto Viejo. This park is well maintained and even better than we had expected. It has one long loop path which follows the coastal circumference of the park, so you are always near the ocean, both good for views and breeze. It was here, in the first kilometer (of the many we walked that day) where we saw 2 species of monkeys: the White-Faced Capuchin and the Mantled Howler Monkey. The Capuchins were a lil easier to spot high above our heads in the canopy because they have 2 colors, black and white, but the Howlers make so much noise that they are next to impossible to miss. The monkeys are defintely aware of the humans (whether one of a group of 10) walking below. They would throw things down toward you, whether fruit or leaves or seeds, or in one case we saw on a park sign: monkey poo. So, one indication of a monkey high above was falling debris.
Besides monkeys, the nice trail led us along diverse lengths of jungle, both in flora and fauna. We saw many types of crabs (sand crabs, hermit crabs), star flowers, these lil red beans I kept thinking looked like jellybeans, and even a yellow viper which a park ranger pointed out in a tree above us while we were enjoying a lookout point overlooking a large coral reef. Apparently if bitten, you have one hour to get anti-venom, so we didn't linger there despite the jovialness of the ranger and his stating that the snake is scared to come down from the tree.
Right at the end of the trail, we lucked out and came across a very close band of Howlers who were making a huge racket for all the tourists and local kids swimming at the beach. MAN those are noisy monkeys!
That concludes the honeymoon adventures report for now.
As an update, Nate and I will be taking off for Philadelphia on Monday, October 27th, so we hope to see some of you before we go, and Nicki & Dusty-- see you soon!!
