Day 8: Trapiche Tour, Cheese Factory and Bat Museum - Exploring Santa Elena

This was an interesting area - lots of cloud forests in a higher elevation.  The town of Santa Elena was small, you could walk from one end to the other.  There was a gravel road leading out of town, and along it were 4 different reserves.  The crazy thing was you would be in one, and a guide would say "that animal doesn't live here, they are in Monteverde" - but you could walk 10 minutes and be in Monteverde, which would be a different enough ecosystem that completely different animals would live there.  It really drove home the importance of climate change - these plants and animals are so dependent on certain temperatures/humidities/elevations that even just a few degrees, or a change in the amount of rain would be devastating to diverse areas like this.

A peek at their beautiful money. The yellow five is missing, it had a monkey on it. 

Painted ox carts have a lot of history in Costa Rica. A family would hire a painter to paint their cart - the more wealth, the more detailed and elaborate the painting. 

We went on a trapiche (mill) tour, and learned about coffee, chocolate and sugar cane.
These are baby coffee plants, they plant them 2 side by side because they have found that in competing with each other they grow faster and stronger.

We were in a cloud forest, which is the perfect climate for coffee to grow.

We ate fresh coffee beans, they were tasty!  Fruity and juicy, they supposedly had a lot of caffeine, but I didn't notice any effects.

Here is one of the machines they use to get to the actual coffee bean - there are 7 layers on the fresh fruit.  I believe this is the first one, that removes the skin and pulp.

The beans on the right had a thin golden layer on them, the ones on the left had it removed and had a nice smooth, waxy feel to them.

This machine vibrated and separated the different grades of beans - all layers removed.  There are 3 grades - peaberry (the highest, results when there is only one large bean in the "pod" as opposed to 2 smaller halves), standard beans - with 2 halves and I think the lowest grade was smaller pieces.  Our guide said that that is all they drink in Costa Rica, the rest are for exporting.

Here is the where it separates the sizes into different buckets

Peaberries on the right, standard in the middle I believe, and lower quality on the left.  

Next they are roasted

This was my favorite part of the tour, since I don't care for coffee or chocolate much...Sugar cane.  Fresh sugar cane is so good!

They cooked down the sugar cane juice

Then we made "candy" from it.  It was pretty good, but had lots of other flavors including iron.

Then we took an ox cart right to the next area.

Our little group, we ran into the same people all over town because it was so small.  The two British girls on the left were on our night tour the day before, and the other two girls from Austria were staying in our hostel.

Next up was chocolate.  

We were also able to try this fresh, again fruity tasting, quite good.

The outer pulp is removed and they are dried.

We were then able to grind them up and try that as well.  Too bitter for my taste, but definitely chocolaty.

They also made guaro here, a hard alcohol distilled from sugar cane juice.  Pretty strong and reminiscent of rubbing alcohol!

Next up was the Monteverde Cheese Factory.  Kind of strange because cheese is not big in Central America, but this factory was started in the 1950's by Quakers.  Milk still arrives daily from 250 farms via truck, car and ox cart - really!

We were able to try 6 of their cheeses.  I'm sorry to say they were not the best cheese I've ever had, it tasted pretty processed to me.  We also watched a video on the history, which was interesting and got some ice cream in the gift shop!  Unfortunately the factory was done running for the day, but it was Tillamook style with big windows so you can watch them work.

The gravel road that connected all the reserves.  We took the bus to the end of the road and walked back to town, hitting the sights as we went.

Our last stop for the day was the Bat Jungle.  Because it was the low season, we had the place to ourselves.  We were given a talk on bats - which reminds me we promised him we'd put up bat boxes in our yard, adding it to the to do list - then looked at the displays he had, including a scale that showed how many pounds of insects we would need to eat daily if we were a bat.  Finally, there was a bat area, with special microphones that allowed us to hear them echolocate.  We could also see them feeding on fruit.

Not a bad day, lots to do in this little town!

Day 7: Arenal to Monte Verde

Today we head from Arenal to the Monte Verde area.  The fastest way is to cross the lake and drive the rest of the way.

We got up and had breakfast, then headed to Arenal National Park to hike around.  There are signs in the parking lot instructing you to back in to your parking spot for a fast get away if needed.  Kind of crazy.  Although the volcano is unfortunately dormant right now.  

There is a man made lake - Lake Arenal right there.  

I think this is a strangler fig - a biggun.  As you looked closely at these trees you would find all sorts of things living in them.  This one had bats and lots of harvestmen (? kind of like daddy long legs, but our guide told us they were actually insects).  At night we found huge spiders and bark scorpions on them.

Here are those bugs, one area of the tree was covered in them and they moved and swayed together.

Clear wing butterfly

This is a crested guan, a relative of the turkey.  You just never know what you'll find in these forests!

Oropendola - you can just barely make out the gold tail.  This was a common bird, their nests hung down from trees like baskets.  Some how I have not one photo of one.

Our first real coatimundi sighting (Aaron saw one in Tortuguero but thought it was a monkey).  He came pretty close to us.

Lizard

I love these beautiful basilisk lizards

We then stopped at a butterfly garden.  They had a small area to show how they raised them, and so you could see them at different stages.  

Aren't these gorgeous!  I'd love a necklace out of a replica...

They also had some amphibians, like this red eyed tree frog - the spokes-animal for Costa Rica.

This is what they look like when they sleep - pretty smart!

They also had some poison dart frogs, these are called something about "blue jeans" in Spanish.  We didn't see any wild frogs, besides some brown less exciting ones.

Tiger beetle

A cemetery on the way back to town.

Casado, of course

Time to return the Jimny.  

Taken from the middle of Fortuna.

And we are on our way to Monte Verde - via jeep/boat/jeep.  They drove us to the lake, we got on a boat, then took a terrible road to Monte Verde. 

Refueling roadside!

We got into Santa Elena just in time to get a wildlife night tour.  We did see a lot of animals...but...our guide was rude.  Like really rude.  There was a Swedish guy on our tour, and when our guide showed us a tarantula, he wanted to know what a tarantula was (it was pouring rain and difficult to see).  Our guide literally ridiculed him for not knowing that word in English, and of course tarantulas don't grow in Scandinavia.  Anyway we got drenched, and I felt bad for the animals, and the Swede.  There were probably 60 people out in groups running around this forest yelling and shining lights on animals just trying to do their thing.  We ended up seeing: a 2 toed sloth with a baby eating, 2 green pit vipers, 2 Mexican hairy porcupines, an emerald crowned toucanet, a mot mot, said tarantula, 2 scorpions, a mouse, a katydid and a stick insect.