Santa Elena, Monteverde

Yesterday afternoon we arrived to Santa Elena, close by the Monteverde National Park. The second cloud forest of our trip. The particularity of this park is twofold : the forest was never touched (primary forest), and most importantly it looks very much as Tarzan's forest. Ficus there are huge, with complex shapes...

Here is Tarzan's playground...

One of the multiple small colorful birds (and hard to photograph!). We also saw some colibris, famous for their ability to stationary flight.

 

We also took a night walk in the forest, to observe the nocturnal activity. This is a hard to see sleeping sloth (paresseux). It is hard to see because it usually takes a 15-hour nap after any short physical activity (mainly eating untouched leaves).

Now this is more scary : a highly poisonous snake (which name I forgot, let's just call it the deadly snake). In the picture, it is in position to attack - probably because Arnaud took a picture with the flash :-).

A "small" tarentula - that looked big enough to me (about my hand's size, but more hairy).

Tomorrow we are splitting the group. Sadly Sevag is flying back to France on Saturday night (red-eye flight, as we apparently say). We on the other hand will keep on going for another week. 

The original plan awas to go to the caribbean coast, from north to south, and then back to San Jose for our flight next Saturday, but bad weather conditions there are making us change our minds. We will head tomorrow to Montezuma, beach town on the pacific side, and the head down to el parque nacional del Corcovado (which holds itself a 2,5% of the earth's entire biodiversity if I understood properly...). Many more pictures to come !