A sky tram ride to remember - Costa Rica Day 5

The previous post on this series is here..

On day 5 we were told there will be an earlier pickup to catch up on missed events from Day 4. We were going to work with two separate companies (although Desafio co-ordinated it). One was the Sky Adventure.. They have the Sky cloud forest walk and the Sky tram. We started the day with this.

Our guide was an interesting person. He looks 40, but turns out he is 64. None of us believed him. He has been walking through this forest all day with tours for ~40 years! Went to school in Indiana to get his undergrad, came back to work for the Costa Rica forest department and raised his family here since. Guess if you walk in fresh air above the clouds all day and drink fresh rain water and eat sparingly, you can look 40 at 64. The best guide we had on any tour..

He showed us all the unique things about the cloud forest, the animals, birds, insects, plants etc. 

The trumpet tree.. lots of birds, animals on this one tree.. apparently boil the leaf in water and drink and it cures respiratory diseases.. 

It was a challenge to photograph anything though. The hanging bridges on this park are looooong.. some of them almost a kilometer. We cross the Transcontinental divide on one of the bridges which is interesting. Movign birds and moving bridge with a long and heavy lens.. I had no chance. After some point, I just put the camera away and walked.

This picture was taken from the Tram.. we had walked across that bridge below which was pretty high up to begin with!

Once we were done with the walk, we told our guide we had to be out of this park by 1 to go to another park. He radioed the tram folks and asked them to hold it for us. We ran to the tram and made it. The sky tram goes every hour. We went through and above the clouds on a Tram! At the top is a tower you can climb and see the clouds hit the mountains. (towards the end of the video). It is like being in an airplane with the windows open. 

I made a solo trip above the tower and came back to get some of the folks in the group to come back with me on a second climb. This was something not to be missed. 

Once we came back down, there was 45 minutes for the pickup. We were asked to come out all the way to the main road (apparently competing tour operator buses don't go into each others parking lots!) where we were picked up by the Selvatura park bus. There is a cafeteria at the Sky tours, and we got a quick bite to eat. Something there got my stomach..the rest of the group was okay, but if you have food allergies, I would play it safe at this place. 

We made it to the butterfly garden and it was great. There were blue morphos fluttering by everywhere.. They had 19 different butterfly species. We spent 45 minutes in that dome and walked out. It was time to get some rest back at the inn's.

Later that evening we were picked up at 6PM to go to the Monteverde preserve with a bus full of people. Then we were split into groups of 8, given flashlights and we walked through the forest at night for a good two hours seeing more sleeping birds, nocturnal animals and insects working the night shift.

Some of them are amazing at camoflage, like this stick insect or leaf insect. This one was 3-4 inches long (the green thing at its tail end is something it secretes to ward off predators)..

This is the first time I saw a bird sleep in the forest with its head tucked inside! They were on the branch sleeping.. always thought they would go to a nest and lie down! learn something new everyday!

and sleeping butterflies..someone had to shine a flashlight towards it for me to get the picture.. we know we didn't disturb the birds (the guide was careful), but the butterflies I am not so sure.. they continued to sleep, but this night tour did give us a window of how active the forest is at night while I had conscience issues and kept thinking "I would not want someone shining a flashlight at me while I am trying to sleep". 

A not so short video of Day 5.. we did cover a lot. We have walked close to 100 miles over 8 days on this trip!

By the time we got off the bus in the town area, it was 8:30. All the restaurants were full and the service was pretty bad. No one was even asking you to come sit in the one Mediterranean place we chose first. We switched restaurants to the Tree top, which had a live band in the top floor and managed to get food before closing time (most of these places close at 9 or 10 PM). 

By the time we made it back to the inn, it was late by Costa Rica bed time standards.

It was a hectic day well spent.

The good thing was we had a 9AM pickup for day 6 and it was going to be one long ride to our next stop...