Zippity

Last night (1st August) we travelled to Monteverde - a nice town up in the mountains, inland to Costa Rica, quite close to San Jose. This contains an area of "Cloud Forest" - so called because of the permanent mist and clouds that pervade it.


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It's nice and cool up in the mountains and a lot more windy. Didn't feel a million miles away from a nice British summer.

It's very touristy here, but for good reason!

We spent most of today in the Selvatura Park - a centre containing aerial walkways and ziplines. Again, it's quite developed in the sense that it's totally geared for visiting tourists with bridges and canopies built into the trees, but that doesn't take away from the beauty of the Cloud Forest. Actually, it means you get a chance to see it from a different perspective (i.e. 10s of metres in the air!).

The first activity was ziplining. This is basically sliding along a slightly declining steel cable, attached by harness. Here is the safety gear:

And here is me in action:

Actually, although I'm not great with heights, I found this fine as you're sort of going along rather than down.

The Tarzan Swing, however scared the crap out of me as you basically start by falling:

After that we visited the awesome hummingbird garden. Although the ziplines were great, I think this was a real highlight for me. There were hundreds of them feeding from nectar filled bottles. They did the classic hovering while feeding, but also they whiz around really quickly (often chasing each other as they're apparently quite territorial).

I could have sat in that garden for hours just watching the birds flying around like hyperactive crack addicts:

I then went for a hike around the reserve which included a series of bridges suspended high over the forest:

Finally, just to finish the forest themed day, we had dinner in this crazy restaurant built around a tree. They were very proud to be awarded "Top 10 Bizarre Restaurant". Not sure "Bizarre" translated properly...