Wednesday, June 25, 2008

This morning Genevieve and I woke up bright and early, eager to go see the frogs again before breakfast.  When we got to the pond, all the frogs were gone!  We couldn’t even find a single one sleeping on a leaf, just a pond full of eggs and tadpoles. We did manage to see all three kinds of monkeys they have at Bosque and also check out the toad pool (where a Jesus Cristo lizard also lives) so the hike was not a total waste. At breakfast Carlos let us know that he had received an email from Lapa Rios about our tour and that he would work with them to arrange transportation. So I guess the two lodges are on friendly terms (don’t feel like such a traitor!). The kids and Mark wanted to hang out at the bungalow and I thought it would be an excellent time to preview the steep Pacific Trail to see if it would be suitable for Charlotte. A quick 20 minutes down and a leisurely 40 minutes up during which time I saw a snake and a poison dart frog!  No problem, even the reluctant hiker can handle it.

After lunch the Lapa Rios jeep came to get us. Once at Lapa Rios they were perplexed that our “friends” weren’t available to join us on the tour, I guess that was the ruse, that we wanted to take a tour together. But they let us go anyway with a couple from Spain. Right outside of the Lapa Rios gate there was a sloth in the tree, and then we boarded another jeep and went down to the beach. We didn’t see much wildlife during the walk, although we did see howler monkeys that had yellow ends on their tails. I’d never seen that before so stupid tourist that I am said “look, that monkey is holding a banana with its tail!”, but the guide said it was common coloring. The kids enjoyed playing with the hermit crabs again, of course. Then once we got on the jeep to return, the monkeys all came out, even squirrel monkeys.  All in all it was a nice walk. Lapa Rios has Costa Rican children doing authentic dances in the evening for entertainment (they were on our jeep on our ride back and just as excited about the monkeys as we were even though they see them all the time), but we didn’t want to miss our excellent Bosque dinner so we took the jeep back to our lodge. We told the driver the kids liked to ride in the back which he interpreted to mean they liked going fast so he drove like a mad man!  Yikes! As it was dusk there were a lot of bats flying around and at one point it looked like he was seriously racing one that was staying just in front of the headlight. Back to Bosque where we cleaned up and had an excellent dinner. Genevieve had instructed us to wake her up if we had another toad on the patio, but when we did and tried to wake her up she was having none of it.

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