Soaring through Monteverde skies (Nov 22, 2010)

We woke up early in the morning since we knew that we had a long day ahead of us. Today we would visit the cloud forest of Monteverde. I was hearing a lot from my friends about how amazing cloud forests are and we would enjoy the hike.

Once we got to the entrance, we bought our tickets and waited for our tour guide. In the meantime, four other Americans joined us as well. It seemed that the guide would be taking the seven of us for the guided tour of the forest.



The tour guide took us through various parts of the cloud forest. He showed us some amazing plant life, trees that looked like giraffes, trees that were ancient and were cared for as a national treasure, and beautiful flowers, some of which were only found in that forest.

We didn't just see plant life in this forest. The guide carried a powerful telescope with him which allowed us to look deep into the trees and vegetation and see things the naked eye would miss. We saw some of the most beautiful birds that were found in all of Costa Rica. We saw a porcupine munch on a fruit sitting high up in the tree. We even got really close to a large caterpillar that was hiding in the leaves and it was so hard to see him since his skin color matched those of the leaves around him. I was totally awe struck by all of this.

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole tour and especially the ability to take pictures through this telescope. It allowed us to take pictures of the birds that we saw sitting high up in the trees.

Once we got done with the tour, we headed back to our hotel to rest up a bit. We still had much of the day ahead of us and a very important activity lined up, ziplining. We had registered with a group that came and picked us up from our hotel at the allotted time. They drove us out to the location of the ziplining and after putting our stuff away, we started to get geared up.

Once geared up, we headed out into the valley to zipline. I think this was  the most fun I had every had in my entire life. The experience was exhilarating and pure adrenaline rush at the same time. We ziplined through 10 or more different lines of various lengths. We did an assisted rappel from a tree which felt like my stomach came upto my throat. We jumped off a high tower to do the tarzan jump. That took a lot out of me but I think I did it mostly to not look like a chicken in front of the people in the group, and I do not regret it one bit. Lastly, we did the superman zipline where instead of being strapped from the front, you are strapped to the line from the back and you zip across a valley looking down at everything around you. This gave us an amazing view of the whole valley and it really took my breath away.


Here are some videos from our ziplining:

And here are the rest of the photos from that day: