As if touching a sloth weren’t enough, on the very next day we got to visit an animal rescue center.  The Web page said we would get to volunteer there, helping to feed the rescued animals.  What kinds of animals would we get to touch there?

Well, we got to see many more than we could touch, but many of the animals at the ASIS Project were conditioned to human contact. Although they were wild animals, a lot of these guys came to the Project from private homes where people thought it was a good idea to have wild animals as pets.  Of course, this is not a good idea, and it’s against the law.  When police are called to one of these homes (usually by angry neighbors), they confiscate the animals and bring them to a place like the ASIS Project.  The people who try to keep the wild animals as pets have to pay a steep fine.

We were able to pet Perla. Our guide said some Costa Ricans saw Americans on tv with potbellied pigs as pets and thought peccaries could be kept, too. Bad call.

Alternately, the person who brought home a baby peccary or spider monkey comes to realize after a time that a teenage peccary or spider monkey is not the best thing to have in a human home.  These people tend to call the police themselves and say something like, “Hey, I found this teenage spider monkey in my living room.”  These animals wind up at ASIS as well.  

Although the goal of the center is to nurse animals back to health and return them to nature. most animals raised with humans cannot be released into the wild.  They would seek human contact, and really freak people.  Also, they would not be able to socialize with other wild animals of their species.  Both of these situations would put the animals at great risk in the wild.  

This spider monkey’s former owner taught it to hold hands.

For that reason we were able to help feed most of the animals, and some of the ones that were destined to spend the rest of their days in the rescue center we were able to touch.

Here’s Lanie’s account:

We went to ASIS. It was really fun.  First, we saw a pig named Perla. Perla was nice and we got to pet her.  Her hair felt like plastic.

Then we saw another pig named Pancho.  He was wild.  We could not touch him.

We also saw a raccoon.  She loved water.

It’s only a little boa constrictor.

Then we saw some spider monkeys.  Next, I got to hold the snake!

We saw lots of birds.  We also saw coatis and white-faced monkeys.

The beautiful ocelot was set to get a bigger cage soon. It could not be returned to the wild.

Then we saw an ocelot.

After a coffee break we got to feed the animals.  First we had to cut up papaya, mango, banana, corn, cucumbers, carrots, and cabbage.  There was also bird seed.

The animals ate the fruit and the corn first, and only ate the vegetables when the other stuff was gone.  The parrots liked the sunflower seeds best.

Getting food ready for the animals

Feeding the Blue Macaw

Editor’s note: Our host in La Fortuna, who was a great source of information on the area, highly recommended a tour with Giovanni.  He said that Giovanni had an almost magical ability to spot animals, and that no one had ever failed to rave about his tour.  So we signed up, even though it meant leaving at 5:30 am!  We thought the price tag was a little steep (that pesky “per person” thing again), but when we saw what Giovanni was doing — preserving his own little section of the rainforest from development, reforesting it, and developing a path that will be handicap-accessible and tailored to the blind, we actually ended up making an additional contribution.  And, we certainly got our money’s worth.  When our morning tour had ended, Giovanni saw how much the girls loved the sloths.  So he told us he’d meet us again in the afternoon and take us to a place where we could see babies up close and touch some iguanas.  He led us on a drive about half an hour away and delivered on both promises!  Giovanni told us he thought Lanie should be a tour guide, since she loves animals so much.  And now, on to Lanie’s review:

Introduction
Mom booked a tour.  It was from a guy who made paths in his own reserve.  In the big reserves, the animals avoid the paths because of all the people.  We woke up early to see the animals.  Here they are!

Toucans
We saw about 5 toucans.  They were so colorful!  Our guide called them froot loops.  We saw two different kinds together.

Blue jeans frog

Blue jeans frog (Strawberry poison dart frog)
They are venomous.  The are small with blue legs and a red middle; that is why it is called the blue jeans frog.

Red-eyed tree frog
They are small.  They are green.  They look like Monty.  (Monty is a stuffed animal that Lanie bought at the women’s craft cooperative store in Monteverde.)

Sloth
We saw 6 sloths in the morning.  They were really fuzzy.  Later we even saw a baby!  We saw a three-toed sloth and two-toed sloths.

Basilisk lizard

Basilisk lizard (“Jesus Christ lizard”)
We saw a big green lizard.  It is a basilisk lizard.  They can walk on water.  The one we saw was in a tree.

Sloth again
In the secret part of our tour we pet a baby sloth.  Our guide looked in all sorts of small trees, then he found the sloth.  It felt like a stuffed animal.  It was so fuzzy!  It moved and we left.

We’re settled into life here in Costa Rica, which has largely meant making peace with seeing the money flying out of our bank account.  We sure ain’t in Nicaragua anymore.

Nadia contributes to the economy by adding another country to her growing toenail clipper/bottle opener collection.

To be fair, the two main places we’ve stayed thus far — Monteverde Cloud Forest and Arenal Volcano — are major tourist destinations.  There are many, many things to do — and all of them cost big bucks.  We were very happy that we’d done ziplining and some guided cloud and rainforest tours in Nicaragua.  The main thing that’s killing us is that here, everything is charged per person.  This makes sense to us for some things, but perplexes us when it comes to hiring a tour guide.  If one of us wanted a guided tour, the guide would take that person around for $18.  But if five of us want to tag along — well, now we’re up to $18 * 5.

For obvious reasons, we don’t have many good pictures from the night tour. This is a phosphorescent beetle, kind of like a firefly, on Lanie’s head.

So, we’ve been pretty selective on which of the vast array of available activities to pursue.  In Monteverde, we signed up for a night tour of the cloud forest, but skipped the guided daytime tour and just walked around on our own.  The night tour was pretty cool, and we saw some interesting animals — a sloth, an olingo (which apparently is related to the kinkajou), a tarantula, a porcupine, and a glowing beetle — but the place we did it was mobbed with groups of tourists, all crowding around the same trees and bumping into each other in the dark.  (We also did the El Trapiche tour, as previously described, and this was unanimously felt to be worth the hefty price tag based on the food samples provided.)

Our first view of Volcan Arenal.

We set out for our next destination, Arenal Volcano, with some trepidation.  I think we may have failed to describe the drive to Monteverde because we’re trying to block it out of our memories, but “harrowing” would be a good word to describe the boulder-strewn barely-a-road through the mountains (surrounded by beautiful scenery that we were unable to appreciate because of (a) motion sickness, and (b) the terror that at any moment the car would break an axle or get a flat tire).  When we finally arrived, we parked the car in the driveway and pretty much didn’t move it again until it was time to leave.

It’s five o’clock somewhere.

If you look at a map, Monteverde and Arenal seem to be quite close together.  However, because the drive involves 45km on a dirt road followed by a long drive around a lake, it takes 3-4 hours.  Bob and I focused our thoughts on the microbrewery that we had read was halfway to our destination, and forced ourselves into the car.

This drive, though terrible by ordinary standards, turned out to be a little easier than the previous one, so we were pleasantly surprised.  The car only made horrible clunking noises (as it hit the rocky road) a few times, and we only stalled a couple.  For the most part, we didn’t need to shift into first and chant, “I think I can…” to make it up the hills.  And oh, that magical moment when we got to Lake Arenal and the pavement began.

Things went so well that we actually arrived at the brewpub, our planned lunch destination, about 10:30.  Fortunately the owner was friendly, and happy to have us sit there for a while using their free wifi — and Bob and I decided to stretch a point on “appropriate hours for beer consumption.”  The brew pub was gorgeous, with huge windows overlooking the lake, but the beer was rather disappointing.  (I tried a pineapple beer, which sounded quite exciting, but turned out, like the other beer we tried, to not taste like too much.)

And our apartment in La Fortuna, at the base of the dramatic Volcan Arenal, turned out to be terrific.  The minute we arrived, the owner William, who lived the next apartment over, had brought his dog out to play with the girls and was proudly showing us all the edible plants that were growing in the yard and up for grabs.  The apartment was just a block or two from the town center, easy to find (probably the first time we didn’t have to reverse

La Fortuna

our tracks multiple times!), and had everything we needed.  The volcano photo at the top of this post is the view from our living room window.  The town was cute (though very touristy), with a lovely town square featuring lots of flowers and dramatic views of the volcano rising above the pretty church.

We took our first day pretty easy, getting some schoolwork in and walking to a nearby (free!) swimming hole.  (This was absolutely beautiful, with twin waterfalls gushing into a deep blue pool under the trees, but we were warned so thoroughly about theft that we didn’t bring our camera

Also, our apartment has iguanas in the yard.

with us.)  On the advice of our host, we’d booked an animal-watching tour the next day — 5:30am sharp!    Read all about it from Lanie tomorrow.

Today we visited Agricultural Disneyland.  In touring La Finca el Trapiche we got to observe the cultivation and processing of three of the world’s most beloved foods.  Nadia will explain a little bit about all three:

What we saw at El Trapiche:

 Sugar cane

Nadia snaps off the sweet insides of a cane that has been peeled.

Sugar cane grows in a plant that looks a lot like bamboo. The sugar is the inside of the stalk. To eat it, you cut off the outside layer, then you pull of a piece and suck the juice out of it. It tastes really sweet.

Coffee
Coffee grows on bushes. There are three types of coffee. The first type is premium. That is when there is only one bean per berry. The next type is first quality. That is when there is two beans per berry. The last type is second quality. That is when there are three beans in a berry.

Three grades of coffee beans: second grade, first grade, and peaberry

You can eat the red coffee fruit. I tried some. It doesn’t taste like coffee, it tastes sweet.

Cocoa

Lanie shows off a cocoa pod.

Cocoa is grown on a small tree. It grows in a pod. The seeds are coated in white paste called cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is used to make white chocolate and beauty products. White chocolate has no cocoa in it at all. After the cocoa butter  is washed off the beans they are dried, roasted, shelled, and ground up with sugar. When you make chocolate, you have to choose what percent of cocoa and what percent of sugar. You also have to decide if you want to add milk.

Sample tastings were everywhere at El Trapiche.  Here the adults try moonshine made from cane juice.

Lanie chimes in about coffee production:

Zoe learned she would get $3 for every basket full of beans she picked. Also, sometimes there are snakes in the bushes.

The El Trapiche tour was awesome! First we went around and picked some coffee and ate it.  The coffee tasted really good.  Zoe had a basket tied around her waist so she could pick red berries off the tree with both hands.  Coffee comes in small red berries.  If there is only one seed inside, it is the best kind.  It is called peaberry.  If it has two beans, it is called first quality.  If has three seeds, it is second quality.

Everyone was a coffee drinker at El Trapiche.

After you pick it, you dry it.  To dry it, you put it in a greenhouse.   Once it’s dry you peel it.  The peel can be used to make parchment paper.  At the end we got to taste the coffee.  It was delicious.

With apologies to our friend Carol, who trudged around Costa Rica for a week with one particular quarry in mind, and who left empty-handed, we can report that we visited the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and saw her prized Quetzal before we even left the parking lot.

“Like a waterfall of teal” See what I mean? Kudos to Zoe for getting these pictures with our point-and-shoot camera.

It’s true. We walked to the reserve from our house, about 700 meters away from the front gates, and saw about 20 people standing in the parking lot looking up. Being a veteran of the US National Park System, I sensed something exciting was afoot. I asked a man who looked like a guide: “At what are everyone seeing here?” (This is an approximation of my Spanish now that I’m not speaking it every day.  Many people here speak fine English.) And he replied, “Why, the resplendent Quetzal, senor.” “Resplendent” almost always modifies this bird in these parts.

The girls didn’t ignore the coati.

Sure enough, like a waterfall of metallic teal feathers from a high branch in a tree, serenely sat the bird that brings thousands and thousands of expensive cameras with long lenses to Costa Rica. Moreover, as I was inside buying our tickets and inquiring if there was a chance of getting a guide through the preserve, Jen and the girls spotted two more Quetzals (slighly-less-resplendent females). Anyone who bothered to look down saw a trio of coatis, which are like mild-mannered racoons with long noses, practically doing synchronized acrobatics in a empty parking space trying to garner some attention.

Cool, yes. Resplendent? Maybe not.

It was almost too much. As it turned out, it was almost everything we saw for the day. If animals were so easy to find you were in danger of parking your car on top of them, who needs a guide?  Am I right?  Actually, no. We guided ourselves through the preserve enjoying lovely scenery and appreciating the well-marked, well-maintained trails, but all we managed to observe of the fauna was a big millipede and several nondescript birds. To be sure, we must have walked by dozens of lovely specimens invisible to our un-trained and un-magnified eyes.

Now, a waterfall of water

A suspension bridge gave a view into the top of the canopy.

We might have opted for a guide — they are highly recommended here — if we could have used a credit card to pay for his services, but all of the reserve’s guides were booked and the mercenary squad only accepts cash. Our visit to the Bank of Costa Rica was scheduled for the afternoon. Also, it seems that the pricing system here does not favor our family. One person can rent a guide for $18, it seems, but a family of five has to pay $18 per person, which sounded a little steep for us. Even after the guy told us he’d waive the fee for Lanie it was a little steep.

The reserve turned out to be a nice place to stroll. We saw a waterfall, lots of cool flowers (which also might have benefitted from a guide’s description) and nice views from a lookout point.

After visiting the reserva, we headed back to our house. (The Quetzals had migrated, but the coatis were still scampering around the parking lot.) Nadia and I walked a few kilometers into town to visit the cajero automatico, then we met the rest of the family at a pizza place that turned out to be several degrees nicer than we expected or were dressed for. Who puts a nice restaurant two miles out past where the paved road ends? At least we were there early enough that there were few people to offend with our emphatic lack of resplendency.

During our walk, Nadia and I also checked out a store run by a cooperative of local artisans. It was a Monteverde version of Durham’s own Main Street Makery. It’s good for us that our travel schedule restricts us from buying large items. The furniture, particularly the hand-made wooden chairs in Nicaragua, were beautiful. The hammocks are appealing, too, but even these are just too big for us to haul around.  Save our money for more tours, that’s what I say.

Tomorrow we’ll take the rest of the family to the coop to see what they think.