Costa Rica Nature Adventure

It's been a few days since our last update, but that's just because we've been so busy. Cloud forests, Zip-lining (again), Tarzan jumping, Nature walking, Shopping, Touring a Chocolate / Coffee / Sugar farm, Capturing local fauna in their native habitat (agouti, coati, capuchin monkeys) and visiting a real-life bat sanctuary. It's quite exhausting! Fortunately, we were able to schedule a bit of free-time as well and we took advantage of the natural hot spring pool(s) at our hotels in Arenal in-between adventures. The hotels were located around the base of the Arenal volcano, which erupted catastrophically in 1968 and destroyed a number of towns and farms. Nowadays the volcano is still considered active, but unlikely to erupt in similar fashion. On clear days you can still see steam coming out of the vent/crater and there are many hotels offering "hot springs" experiences around the base of the volcano, with water heated by ongoing geothermal activity underneat...

Hi! This is Elliott, and I will tell you a bit about spelunking. I saw lots of animals, like bats, spiders, a tarantula, lots of crickets, and a scorpion spider. The crickets had very long spider legs, and they were very creepy. We also had to squeeze through a foot long and a foot wide hole.  It was a tight squeeze, but everyone except mom fit. Then, we had to climb up a three foot wall into a small room. Finally, me and dad had to slide on our bellies for three or four feet to get out.    We also saw the oldest formation in the cave, the altar. Our guide said that it is more than twenty three million years old! We also saw the Papaya, another cave formation.  This is Wesley: My favorite thing I did was seeing the spiders crickets and bats. Hey, it’s Lorelei! Cave spelunking was fun, even though at parts it seemed like you were going to be stuck underground for the rest of eternity. I found the cave crickets insanely interesting, despite the fact that they were cree...

The currency of Costa Rica is the Colón  and the symbol is  ₡ / CRC. There are approximately 540 Colones per US $ at present (e.g., a Colon is worth less than 1/5th of a penny), but practically speaking it’s possible to travel to Costa Rica and pay entirely in US $. Most restaurants / stores use both currencies interchangeably and you can pay in either (or possibly receive change in $  after paying the check in  ₡). That said, there are a number  of impractical things about paying for things in Costa Rica.  First and foremost, tipping is ubiquitous within the tourism industry and tour guides/drivers/etc don’t take Visa or Venmo. So we’ve been scrambling to maintain a supply of 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000  ₡ bills (or US $1/5/10s), but the volume of tips makes this challenging. It is important to support the people who are actually serving us, but it would be So Much Better if they got paid by the actual price of our tickets and not from additional “voluntar...

I saw a lot of animals on the nite hike! I took a lot of pictures. It rained a lot! it was very dark outside. Most of the animals were frogs. They were mostly tree frogs. They were mostly small ones. Poison Dart Frog Red Eyed Tree Frog Yellow Tree Frog Bee Hive

Hello, this is Elliott, and l am going to tell you about my zip line experience. I went on a series of seven zip lines, but there was one tiny one at the beginning as a practice and one at the very end that was also very small, so there were basically only five.  The five REAL zip lines were very long and exciting. My favorite was the fifth one because it was the longest and it was named “The Big Dada”.  I also liked the fourth one because it was the second longest and it was named “The Big Mama”.  The only bad thing about my experience is that Wesley was not heavy enough to go on his own, so he had to go with me. His hand was in my face on the first zip line, so that is why I didn’t really like it. The view was also amazing. Well, from the second, third, fourth, and fifth at least. I couldn’t see the view on the first one. I was up like  three hundred feet off the ground! I could see the lake, the trees, and the villages. The houses 🏠 were all so small! I had a ver...

Today is the first real day of our vacation, and I’m insanely excited!!! We went on a pretty long hike which our guide said it was about two miles. It felt like longer. We saw lots of amazing wildlife, though! This is my first time being in a tropical rainforest, so I was pretty excited. The first bit of the hike was pretty quiet, but before long we came across a line of leaf cutter ants. Our guide told us about how they didn’t eat the leaves, but instead bright them back to their anthill, where they grow mushrooms. The ants are kinda like farmers! Of course, I already knew all of this. We saw many other animals, including keel billed toucans, some emo peacocks I can’t remember the name of, and laughing hawks. My favorite animal by far, though, was the eyelash pit viper. It was sooooo cute!!!! Our guide said that they use a special organ in their head to sense the body heat of their prey, and then ambush them. I already knew that too. Anyway, yesterday was an exciting premiere to our t...

We saw a lot of interesting animals on a hike around the base of the Arenal Volcano yesterday, but perhaps the most interesting was the Leaf-Cutter Ant , which is a voracious farmer of forest leaves —- that it doesn’t eat! We saw several long lines of ants carrying a trail of leaf pieces into their underground mounds.  Video: NOT Dave Matthew’s Band Amazingly, the ants take the leaves to growing chambers where they cover the leaves in their own spit/vomit so that they begin to decompose. As the leaves decompose, they start to grow a fungus that is the primary food source for colony, which can consist of more than five milllion members! They never eat the leaves at all! Even more amazing, some of the worker ants have a unique anti fungal spit that they secrete to kill other types of fungus so only their unique fungal food will grow. Talk about a complex farming society! They’ve been doing this for over 20 million years! External sources :  https://ticotimes.net/2015/04/03/the-...