The Rainforest

Mark and Martha trekking through the rain forest



Some delicate and beautiful mushrooms growing on a log

Waiting for a beer after our long walk

November 24, 2007

It is about five on Saturday and two action packed days have passed since I’ve had a chance to blog. Yesterday Renzo and Ivan cooked breakfast as well as dinner. Before coming here, I had thought I wanted to go to market, buy food and cook Costa Rican style but sitting by the pool with a drink and being served our meals beats self-service any day. It beats going out as well. It’s like having a gourmet restaurant come to you! They even serve hors d’oeuvres before dinner and last night it was tuna sashimi, as good as the finest sushi restaurant, so good we have requested it again tonight. Last night for starters we also had miniature quesadillas, brie with pineapple, and chips with their home-made salsa. Dinner last night was steak, mashies and mixed sautéed veggies, a nice switch from the wonderful fish we have been eating at almost every meal. They are cooking again tonight and I can hear them milling about in the kitchen as I write this. Everyone else is either sleeping or at the beach.

After our lovely brunch yesterday, we all proceeded to the beach where the kids and David and Kelly wanted to surf again while Mark and Martha and Tom and I decided to walk into the Manuel Antonio National Park, which is right there next to the beach. The entrance to the park is opposite from a small inlet and only accessible by boat or by wading through water, depending on the tides. At the time we went, the boat was required, so for a dollar each the four of us piled into a rowboat which took us to the park entrance.

Manuel Antonio National Park is a rain forest and the humidity attests to that. The vegetation is lush. There are signposts along the paths explaining what the various plants are, all in Spanish but no problem since we had Martha. Mark is also fluent in Spanish which must have happened when we weren’t looking. He says he speaks it almost every day with his patients.

Some of the trees are poisonous and the signs clearly say Do Not Touch. Vines and ferns and flowering plants are all tangled together and some tree trunks snake through the sand for great distances. A lot of one’s time is spent looking skyward in hopes of seeing at least some of the many different kinds of birds and animals which reside above the land. The resulting stiff necks are worth it—we saw a troupe of white-faced monkeys almost immediately. But being old hands at the white faces, we were hungry for something a little more exotic. Oh pul-eeze, you are probably saying—already the monk-faced monks are old hat. But they are not. I promise you I could watch them forever with their quizzical expressions and wise eyes. One was inching slowly along a branch and reached out to grab a vertical branch in front of him. The branch broke off in his hand. I kid you not—he looked at the branch in disgust and threw it to the ground. Just as you or I would do.

The path was wide and flat and we proceeded to amble slowly for ten or fifteen minutes, listening and looking for wildlife. Lizards and iguanas are abundant but otherwise we didn’t see much else. Ahead was a fork in the road, one side leading to a road which circled back to the entrance and the other a little more uphill but with a sign which said mirador—lookout. Much more interesting, we thought. So we entered into the deepest jungle convinced that that would be where the animals would be ready to grace us with their finest moves.

We walked, no, we trekked, during which Tom is grumbling periodically that there must be a temple in here somewhere, for at least an hour over very difficult terrain, muddy and slippery at times, steep and root-encrusted at others, and always vertical, and we saw not a single animal; well, maybe a few lizards but nothing unusual and no monkeys or other flying mammals. We didn’t see many of the two legged variety either, although we passed a couple of Europeans, Swedes maybe, coming down, who said keep going you’re almost there it’s worth it, we saw a big iguana, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before. But, shades of the Tiger’s Nest, we were not about to give up before achieving the goal of whatever it was that was up there so we kept on trekking.

Just as I (and at least one other who shall remain nameless) was about to give up the ghost, we did arrive at the lookout. It was a small wooden platform which could hold maybe six people and which looked out over the ocean. The Ocean! We can see the ocean from our pool deck while sitting on a padded deck chair and drinking a beer! The iguana was there, two in fact, but not exactly the wildlife we hoped for.

But oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained. We trekked back down in much less time then it took to get up and when we reached the fork there was a Japanese American couple about to begin the trek up and asked us if it was worth it. Absolutely not, sez I, it takes an hour and there are no animals and the view is a very pretty view of the ocean. So they ended up walking with us down the other fork to the exit of the park and we became great friends and we saw a lot of animals.

First we saw a three toed sloth hanging on a tree. He’s three toed because he is a dark brown color, but also Mark swears he actually saw three toes on his foot through his binoculars. Then we saw a troupe of howler monkeys and they are as fascinating as the white-faced. We saw some spider monkeys and then we saw a two toed sloth, light tan and snub nosed and looking like a slug hanging from a branch. Mark said he read that they only descend to the ground once a week to defecate. The very definition of laziness. We saw more monkeys, lots of colorful lizards and then just as we were about to leave the park, Mark spotted a Jesus Christ lizard, called a basilisk I think, very unusual looking and the ones that literally walk upright on water, thus the sobriquet.

As I write this, we have also completed the ziplining, but it is now after eleven, everyone is asleep and I need to be asleep as well, so that will be the gist of the next chapter.