The La Paz Waterfalls and the Jungle Voyage

 

A young Maroth?

So after having a great lunch we started hiking on the trail to the falls. Elja, the guy from Finland, got a ride in a cart which showed up and then disappeared. Like the sun, we knew we would "meet again", somewhere down the trail. We went thru a hummingbird feeding area. Like everything else, Costa Rica has an abundance of hummingbird species, something like 60. As beautiful as hummingbirds are up in Michigan where I come from, not surprisingly down here, the birds are bigger and brighter. There was an absolutely brilliant purple one at the feeder, probably 4 times the normal size of one from Michigan. I try' d to get a picture of it, but if you can get a good shot of a hummingbird, your doing pretty good. They were everywhere feeding on the sugar water feeders. Our guide said you should never mix the sugar water any stronger then 80-20, water to sugar, because it will rot their beaks. A lesson for all the hummingbird feeders out there.

We also walked by a Spider Monkey exhibit. While not native to Costa Rica, there is an abundance of monkey species here as well. One begins to wonder if there is anything that doesn't live down here.

 

Scenes along the way

The canyon leading to the falls

As the trail narrowed into a stair heading down along the river canyon we were treated to some amazing views. The rain was now mixed with mist coming off the river and the upcoming falls. Here too you got the sense that this jungle never get's a chance to dry out. Especially along the rivers and falls. Heavy rains have pounded the area continually and the rivers are all very high. In fact some of the roads on the Caribbean side of the country were closed. We would see everything that they told us we would on the tour, but we would have to back track on our journey and also deal with a mud slide that had taken out part of the road. This all added two more hours to an 11 hour day, it was going to be a long day.

The trail gets steep

The closer we got to the falls, the wetter we got. It was hard to even take pictures because I was afraid my camera was going to get wet. It also was a lot more humid then up on the Volcano summit, and I was getting as wet from sweating as from the rain and waterfall mist. Still it was all beautiful, and going swimming would have been the thing to do.

Overall being on the tour did save a lot of time. I couldn't have found a lot of these places very quickly on my own. And having the guide to explain things was of some help. Not having to worry about the drive back was a plus too. That being said I am not use to taking a tour. While this was not a hurried tour, you did have to stick together, and any sort of self exploration was not really allowed. You saw and stopped at places that were part of the tour. The guides speal was obviously set up, and one had to sort of press the guide to actually get other information that they didn't deem part of the tour. These are the down sides. Still again it would be hard to see as much as we did trying to find these places yourself...

The La Paz Waterfalls

The upper falls

The Mist kept everything soaked for hundreds of yards around it.

 

This was the lower part of the upper falls, they were so big you had to take several pictures to get them all in.

The second set of falls down were as big as the first ones, they made four in all.

After seeing the first set of falls, we then cut away on the trail to get back to our bus. We would see the lower falls from the road. It was really getting hot now, and the trail was making us go single file the whole way. If you didn't move fast enough you would be taken over by another group. If you moved too fast you could find yourself in the middle of a family and be part of their group. Finally the trail came to an end, conveniently right at a gift shops door. You had to walk right thru the gift store to get out. I ended up buying a candle for my host family and then ran into Elja eating a candy bar. He had gotten dropped off  ahead of us and was waiting. A group of Quati's ( Central American Raccoons ) were being fed by the tourists gathered around the end of the trail. The family I had been caught in the middle of was having problems. The hike was more then the mother and father had anticipated and mother was complaining loudly. I felt bad for them, it was a rough trail, and mom was losing it yelling at her kids (her kids were 40 years old!).

Finally after getting our group all together we boarded our bus and headed down the mountain for an hour and a half trip towards the river and our jungle cruise.

As we were driving along our guide suddenly told the driver to pull over. He jumped out of the bus and ran back down the road, stopping right in the middle to reach down and get something. Camera ready several of us jumped out to see what was going on, after all we were on an expedition! He had found one of the things I really wanted to see on my trip down here, a tarantula. Outside of a python, or a jaguar, this was right at the top of my wish list, even ahead of a crocodile, which I had seen on my previous trip down in July.

Here's our brave guide letting the tarantula climb up into his hand.

He offered me to take it in my hand, I had to decline, though I did pet it.........

One of the Asian ladies allowed it to climb in her hands, everyone else, including myself declined. While our guide was out in the middle of the road I thought he was going to get hit by some wild driver coming around the corner. Another bus showed up and stopped and he brought it over to their bus to show them. Obviously not the first time all this had occurred. Still to me it was the highlight of the tour, and one of the ones on the whole trip, to see a live tarantula in the wild. After he had let it go on its way, we continued on ours.

The road coming down from the volcano and the falls was as steep and winding as most of the roads in this country. Eventually we made it to where our river boat tour was waiting for us. We unloaded and got on the boat, a rather shaky long narrow boat powered by two Suzuki 115 hp. engines. If everyone rushed to one side you got the feeling that the whole boat may tip over. Our guide grabbed a microphone, our driver untied us and we were off.

The boats tied up on the other side of the river, they looked just like the ones we were in.

The river was quite wide and there were a lot of boats tied up, most off them looked like tour boats as well. Our guide told us the river is like a road would be anywhere else. People use it to get around, and there are even "boat taxi's" for people to get from one town to the other. He said if you follow the river for a couple of hours it would take you to the river that follows the Nicaraguan Costa Rica border. The river was high and was moving fast after all the rain that they had been having.

Looking down the river, it was obviously higher then normal. It was also lower then it had been, there was debris 6ft above the current level up in the trees.

At this point I could feel the difference from anything else I had experienced on this trip, or really any river I had ever been on before. It was a tropical river with a lot more different things going on then any other river I've been on, and I practically grew up on a big river in Michigan. I finally got a small sense of what a tropical river is about, and it wasn't hard to imagine what the Amazon would be like. The air was warm and humid, and so many kinds of wildlife I have never seen before, or just on t.v., or in the zoo, all either lived by the river, in it, or over it. The sense of wildness, and feeling like you could disappear on a river into an impenetrable almost primeval forest was not much different in ways then being up in the northern wilderness of Canada or Alaska and knowing the tundra was just as vast and just as impenetrable, except for maybe the rivers that enter it. It also was not hard to imagine the early native people who lived here and made there livings in this jungle, much like they still do in remote areas of the world. That primordial feeling sort of came on me, like this is the real wildness from which we came. Almost unnerving in ways when one can imagine the early primordial man is on some level still alive in us.

I have often wondered what it would be like to paddle the Amazon. This boat ride was just giving a hint what a trip like that would be like...

After we got going we headed down river, there wasn't very much boat traffic at all, and the only people we saw were a couple of fisherman on the banks with their dogs. Our guide said there were over 5 different fish that lived in the river, I got a sense there was a whole lot more of other things living in and around it.

The Howler Monkey's, kind of far away, but you could hear their deep throated grunt really well.

We first came upon a band of howler monkey's high up in the trees. We couldn't see them very well, but our guide with his microphone made the sound they make. A deep throated sound that sort of vibrates up into the mouth. To hear a whole band of them make that noise was kind of unnerving as well. I couldn't imagine camping out and hearing that sound at night.

As we moved down the river we found a group of nesting bats on the underside of a tree. Their the smallest bats in the world at only an inch and a half long. They looked like they are part of the tree. Other animals we saw were Iguana's, a Kayen (kind of a small alligator), an assortment of birds, and a lizard that runs on top the water. Again I was on a river, but that's where the similarities ended. There was nothing here that lived in Michigan that I could tell.

The smallest bats on the planet, sleeping on the underside of a tree.

After about an hour of touring, and our guide did do everything he could to show us what was on the river, we returned to our bus after we unloading from the boat and tipping our boats captain. We had to get ready for the long trip back over the volcano and the pass in the fog and coming darkness. Normally we could have taken a quicker route back to San Jose but the road was out due to heavy rains.

Here was one of the Iguanas we saw, this one on a branch overhanging the river.

This bird which is the only bird in the world without natural oils in its feathers must dry itself off after each hunt.

They told us it would be a two hour drive back, but with heavy traffic, fog and winding mountain roads it was probably closer to 3. As we got back to San Jose and started dropping everyone off, me being almost last since I was the first one picked up, I said goodbye to Elja and wished him luck. He said he was going to be in San Jose for a week before heading to South America. As he unloaded, got a cigarette offered to him by our guide and stood there at the locked gate to his hotel entrance smoking it, us waiting to make sure he got in, I couldn't help but think again of him as being sort of an oddity. Alone at 84 traveling the world. I guess in ways it made me feel uncomfortable like that was basically what I was doing now, except I came down for school and dental work, but it wouldn't be hard to find myself in his shoes some day, and I'm not sure I was comfortable with that, judgement and clinging on my part? The more of the world you see sometimes I think the more you feel you may need to see, knowing that it in itself will never be able to fill you. I don't know but I think there is a certain loneliness that comes with travel, and when you expand your travel to countries, cultures and languages your not use to, it can kind of amplify that feeling. I remember feeling it in Alaska sometimes like out on the Aleutian Islands, their hauntingly beautiful, and isolated with some of the most extreme weather on earth. Cold, wet and lonely is how I described them once.

So we said goodbye to  Elja and wished him well, after another stop it was my turn and I said goodbye to the kids from Houston, they all gave me a rousing farewell, and we wished each other well. I thought too of Mo Mo the Syrian guy seemingly without a home. I hope he can travel again in the middle east and that he takes that overland route he was talking about. Maybe he can find his people and a part of himself again. A journey we all seem to be making in one way or another.....

A banana plantation along the river, the bags are wrapped around the bananas to protect them from birds and insects.

A Day Tour in Costa Rica

 

A large coffee plantation on our way up the mountain

So finally with my dental work about done and school over, I signed up for a tour to get out of town and do some sight seeing. I had try' d to do one the first weekend I was here but the bus was an hour late and I ended up going home. The following weekend was just rain, and now I had to try to at least get out and see something before I left. I would have done more tours but the weather has just been rain, and more rain. This is the rainy season for the Caribbean and the Central Valley where San Jose is, but the locals say they never get rain like this, and for them, very cold. Sometimes in the 40's (Fahrenheit) at night.

This was our first stop on our way up to see the Volcano. A gift store with this farmer and his oxen who charged $1 a photo (I didn't pay)

One of the reasons I wanted my bike down here was to be able to do day tours. But because of poor weather, being busy anyway with school and the dentist, the heavy traffic and poorly marked roads, not to mention it being dark by 6:00 every night, it seemed easier and safer to sign up for some tours. I think if the weather would have been better I would have got out more then I did, and did some exploring. But still finding your way around down here when there are no street signs and your right in the middle of a big city does tend to make the most routine trip become an adventure.

So I signed up for what is called The Highlights Tour. An 11 hour bus ride originating in San Jose that included a trip up to Poas Volcano, a visit to a Butterfly farm and Botanical Gardens. Also the La Paz waterfalls and then down to the lowlands to take a boat ride thru the Sarapiqui Jungle.

I forgot the name of these common flowers , but they were all over the back yard at our first stop.

The bus picked me up at Intensa (my school) about 6:30  am. After about 3 or 4 more stops at local hotels we were on our way. We had a pretty full bus and our guide spoke both Spanish and English. In fact everything he said, he said twice, once in each language. Our group included five younger kids from the Houston area , though they were really from all over. Argentina, Syria, Japan and the states. With couples from Connecticut , Florida and El Salvador. There was also an 84 year Finland man who immediately after stepping on the bus introduced himself as "Elja from Finland" to the whole bus. That out of the way, he sat down. I noticed he had a Harley Davidson signea on his sweater and I wondered if he maybe was a fellow motorcycle traveler.

As we wound our way out of the Central Valley as its called, the big valley that runs thru the middle of the country and has San Jose, Costa Rica's largest city in it, we immediately began to get really great views of the valley. We made one stop at a tourist shop which was owned by the coffee plantation, got some photo's of a farmer and his oxen, and then continued on our way. Soon we stopped at another shop and had breakfast. Here I would get a chance to talk more with Elja, and also to talk to the couple from Connecticut.

A traditional Costa Rican Breakfast of Rice and Beans, scrambled eggs, bread, fried banana's and coffee

It turns out Elja was planning on buying a Harley Davidson in the states and then driving it down to Argentina. But one of the things about buying a bike in many countries and then trying to take it out is you have to have owned it for 6 months, something he wasn't planning on. So after arriving in the states and finding that out he decided to just travel the whole way on bus, plane and boat. After arriving in Argentina he was planning on trying to get a cabin on a freighter heading back to Europe, or there a bouts, a month and a half trip.

This Tree Sloth was on the side of the road as we rode by. Its was so wet, like everything else up here, it looks like it never gets a chance to dry out.

Elja kind of reminded me in ways of Bob Able, a guy many of us in Alaska met when we first moved up there. Legend had it, or at least Bob did anyway, that along with his wolf dog they both had walked the entire length of the Alaska Highway. This was back in the 70's, and there was even a write up in one of the local papers about it. Bob himself smoked and drank, and there were times he would dance the night away with us youngsters, sometimes clutching at his heart when it became too much. Sometimes we really thought it was going to be "Bob's last dance". His wolfdog "Lucky" would always be waiting for him outside the bar. Bob would often tell us that wolfs don't make good sled dogs because they don't have enough breadth in their chest and lung capacity. One of those things I always remember, probably because of the person who told me... Anyway, Elja wasn't exactly Bob, but I think they're both adventurers who always will be, regardless of their age.

I asked him if he had family and he told me he had two daughters living back in Finland. At 84 to try and take a Harley all the way to Argentina, and not speak Spanish either, I had to kind of wonder. Yet here I am doing close to the same, just a little younger. It left me not knowing what to think. On the one hand isn't it great someone would not let their age stop them and here he was at 84 traveling the world. On the other hand I had to wonder if he really knew what he was getting into and his limits. If nothing else, at least buy a smaller bike and learn Spanish, and always have an emergency plan, which he may or may not have had. I did want to ask him what his daughters thought of him traveling alone like this, but never got the chance.....

Elja from Finland. Traveling alone at 84, I had respect for him, I also feared a little for him.

The couple we had breakfast with were from Connecticut and were just down for the Thanksgiving weekend. They both seemed to do a lot of traveling having been all over the world. She was from the Philippines and was going to law school and writing a book (as she traveled) about accounting for lawyers. I'm not sure what he did. It seemed they just traveled whenever they had time for it, just sort of fitting it in with their days off, study, or whatever. It was like it was a priority in their lives as much as school, work or any other activity was.

Our first goal was to reach the top of Poas Volcano, while not active with lava, it never the less sends out a lot of steam and sulfur dioxide creating acid rains that affect a lot of the surrounding area. It also has one of the largest craters of any volcano on earth, nearly a mile across while lying deep in a cloud forest, something it probably creates for itself by holding in the clouds. Its kind of like trying to see Mt. McKinley (Denali) in Alaska, there are no guarantees of seeing it when you visit it, or any of the volcano's in this country when you go on the tours. 

The Poas National Park Visitor Center, and the trail leading to the crater.

Our guide leading our group (he's ahead of the group on the right)

The farther up the mountain we got, the cloudier it became. The road was very winding and it had steep drop offs to the sides. To not be able to see anything up here was a little unnerving. Our guide talked about the "acid rains" that come from the volcano itself and effects so much life, vegetable and animal, around the summit. Some of the huge leaves of plants up here had built such a resistance to the rain that they were a quarter inch thick, and like rubber. As we continued on the walkway to the crater it continued to mist and rain. It reminded me of the Pacific Northwest Rainforests, except here was warmer. It also like there, at times looked like the place doesn't actually ever dry out. Everything just looks like its continually wet. In fact the rainy season is about 9 months long here, kind of like the winter in Alaska, just a different type of extreme.

 

Here I am at the crater, I don't know what I"m grinning about, its raining and you can't see a thing.

Here's the view of the crater, completely clouded in, its down there somewhere!

The jungle was so fertile, humans seemed to be sprouting out from underneath the foliage.

 So as we made our way down from the Volcano and got on the bus, we headed for out next stop, the La Paz Butterfly farm and Botanical Gardens. The rain and mist wasn't letting up, and we could barely see as we drove thru the clouds again.

The path thru the La Paz gardens

The screened in bird area in the gardens

Arriving at the gardens we did a walk thru the bird area (a big fenced in area that houses several species of birds, which is also next to the fenced in monkey area) and I got some photos of the Macaw's and Parrot's that are housed there. After that the path led us into the Butterfly farm and housing area. This is a big glassed in area, filled with many species of butterflies, everything from Monarchs to the famous Blue Maroth's (don't know if I got that spelling right). Also there were rows and rows of cocoons in various stages of their molting cycle. The guide said it was too cold for them to come out of their cocoons, but on a sunny day they would hatch, or come out into the warmth as butterflies.

Part of the Butterfly farms enclosure

The butterfly nursery

The infamous, Blue Maroth

Another one of our "butterfly hosts". Their were hundreds flying everywhere.

After we left the butterfly farm it was time for lunch. This time I sat down with Elja, the couple from Connecticut and the 5 kids from Houston. While most of them seemed to be just living in Houston, not going to school as I thought, they were still from all over. Mo Mo was from Syria and was very interested in my trip. He himself wanted to take the overland route to India thru the middle east, and wanted to know where he could find information about the trip. He apparently had refused to go into the army in Syria (a requirement for all male citizens I guess) almost 10 years ago and was considered a deserter. He had not been back since though apparently after 10 years he could return now if he wanted to. I told him that was pretty rough, but he said he didn't hardly know anyone there anymore anyway.

There were the two Asian ladies, and the guy from Argentina and the other one that I really didn't get a chance to talk to. They were all traveling together and had to leave to go back to Texas on Sunday.

The lunch was all you could eat and had a variety ranging from hot dogs and pizza, to salad, roasted chicken, of course rice and beans, and a really good rice pudding for desert. Elja had a couple of beers while he was there, he wasn't doing all the hiking we were, he was getting rides ahead of us and meeting us at different spots. He told us he had been trying to talk to the table full of nuns sitting next to our table but they all spoke Italian and he wasn't getting anywhere! He said he wasn't sure if they were from Italy, but they sure spoke like it!

These Rhinoceros Beetles are native to Costa Rica as well, they are about the size of your hand.

This whatever it was, was over a foot long. Costa Rica has more of a variety of animal life then any other place on the planet, over 600 different species live here.

So after a really good lunch, and a walk thru the reptile and insect house, we began the long hike down to check out the La Paz water falls. The day was only half over and we had already seen quite a bit, or like up at the volcano in the clouds, saw a lot of nothing!

See you Monday (Lunes) for more jungle adventures...