Cerro Lodge and Carara National Park

 



Memories of traffic clogged San Jose are long gone, and the reputation of Costa Rica as an eco paradise has firmly replaced it. One part of that reputation rests on the food. Today, as on every day of the tour, breakfast began with fresh papaya, pineapple, and watermelon. These fruits are without exception the most flavourful we have ever tasted. And then today there was banana pancake with chocolate chips, the pancakes thick and hot, not cold and thin like in Europe. Add to this eggs and fried plantain - so sticky and perfect, and that sort of thin, acidic Costa Rican coffee? Umm, umm!

This breakfast was taken at the dining/observation deck, and in some sort of marketing dream, Scarlet Macaws came from the forest to join us. At first I was respectfully keeping my distance, but eventually two flew up and perched one foot away. These are wild and free birds, eh!






Other birds also came to the deck, not to mention a monkey, making a great start to the day:
















We piled into the van for the short trip down to the Carara National Park. This would be a far more "technical" and long walk along a jungle trail. Alex began by warning us to stay in single file along the track. His words were like "If you want to quickly find a venomous snake, just stray from the trail" and "This is not Disneyland, it's a real forest!". One of the main and first things we noticed was the giant Kapok trees, with broad buttressed roots, and easily as tall as Firs or Cedars we can see on the west side of Vancouver Island.

Alex began to spot birds deep in the foliage, and the thought came to me: If we had travelled to China, to the Shaolin temple, to visit some kung fu master, then the hype would be there so that whatever feats of meditation or gymnastics we might see would be expected. But Alex here was demonstrating absolutely insane powers of observation, without fanfare. He would seemingly glance into the deep forest and quickly say "Ok guys, back there, follow my pointer" and then would name some obscure bird, sitting at an impossible distance. "Ok, here, look in the scope". I really can not overstate how impressive this is. This guy is just a master of the forest!


Anyway, with a lot of "What, what, where, where?? my camera managed to pick up a few of these. Meanwhile Dodie's less powerful camera was documenting a lot of other aspects of the forest and the walk.


It will take some time to curate and figure out what we got on the walk. For now, here is a dump that might still be interesting:



































































































For the last part of the day, some of the group took a walk with Alex down the dirt road that leads to the lodge. This produced a Black Faced Trogon and some Montezuma Oropendulas at least. This would be our last walk peering into impenetrable leaves. Tomorrow we are going out on a boat - no leaves!!



























Sorry for so many photos, and so many lacking captions or supporting stories! Even after about two weeks I have not settled on the best way to do this blog. The main options are (a) to tell the story, with a few illustrations or (b) tell the story, but get all the birds in there.  It's kind of irrelevant, because with our time being programmed from 5:30 a.m. to an exhausted bedtime, I am lucky to post anything, let alone something coherent!

I can tell myself that I will fix it all up once we are home, and maybe some of that will happen. But soon after returning home we need to plan the return to Europe. At the very least, though, I will put all our birds out of their notebooks and spreadsheets and into eBird. That will give a much greater feeling of organization, a feeling I am much lacking just now!










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