The morning began slowly, with me out of bed at 5:00 and checking e-mail and reading until Molly awoke around 8:00. An hour later we went downstairs to the garden lobby for coffee and a big plate of fruit: nanners, papaya, pineapple and watermelon. Then it was off to the ATM for Molly to get cash. We passed by the Flip Flop Restaurante and I took this picture for KT.
It was then to a nice little hippie organic restaurant-cum-art gallery where we bumped into Dave, an expat who was on our chocolate tour a few days ago. He joined us at our table and proceeded to talk effusively about himself for forty-five minutes, as Molly and I endured patiently. He seemed to want us to go to a bluegrass/rock event happening tomorrow night. We finally managed to disengage ourselves and walked back to our hotel to call a taxi to take us to our private tour at the Jaguar Rescue Center. It’s an organization that takes in local creatures that have been injured, and tries to nurse them to health and release them back into the wild.
Our guide was a young English woman who knew a lot about the animals. We began by looking at the poisonous snakes of the region, including pit vipers, a fer de lance and a coral snake. People find them in their gardens and call the rescue center to remove them. She told us what I’d heard before: that there are something-hundred types of snake in Costa Rica, with a minority but still a good number being poisonous.
Next on our tour: the baby two-toed sloths. They come in because they’ve fallen out of trees or their mothers have gotten electrocuted on the power lines. Their body temperature is one of the lowest of the mammals (or was it the lowest?) and likewise their heart rates are at the other extreme of hummingbirds.
A wild agouti came running by to eat some of the food left out for the rescue center animals.
One of the most entertaining parts of the tour was getting to sit in on a blanket with five baby monkeys — capuchins and howlers — and letting them crawl all over us. They’d leap onto our heads and wrap their prehensile tales around our necks and dangle upside down. One seemed particularly enamored of my lap and another took off and chewed on my glasses. We weren’t allowed to take pictures there.
Our two-hour tour turned into a three-plus hour one, as our guide patiently answered our numerous questions. Molly gave her a most generous tip. She’s a volunteer and that’s her only means of survival.
We took a taxi up to Caribeans where we’d had our chocolate tour and loaded up on very pricey bars for souvenirs. I had a fresh papaya batido (fresh fruit blended with water and sugar) while zipping on the legs of my convertible pants in preparation for our next adventure, a night walk through the primary forest of La Ceiba, the location where the rescue center releases its recuperated animals. This time our guide was a young Canadian woman who had studied zoology in college. We started the evening with a dinner of pasta and the ubiquitous rice and beans and fruit. I ate a lot.
Molly hadn’t yet seen a snake in the wild, and before we even began our walk was satisfied as we watched a skinny little cat-eye snake climb down a branch in search of the abundant frog eggs in the pond below.
We slipped on big rubber boots and tromped through the dark night, passing numerous Brazilian wandering spiders, three-inch monstrosities (and according to some, the world’s most toxic spiders) that sat on wide leaves right next to the trail. Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about even kind and gentle arachnids, so I was a wreck. But we managed to steer clear as we navigated the narrow path, brushing against wet leaves as we went. The guide spotted a couple other non-venomous snakes, and then Molly found the prize: a hog-nosed pit viper curled up on a wide leaf right next to the trail looking like a pale pile of poop. The picture is blurry and I didn’t want to risk taking another one.
A few meters later down the trail we encountered a coiled and sleeping bright yellow eyelash viper.
We saw an opossum scrambling into the foliage. We walked through a stream and heard a striped owl hooting in the distance. We all turned off our flashlights to experience the jungle in the full dark. Lights back on, we clomped through a river and back up a slope to where the other humans were. At about 9:00 we walked back out to the gravel road in this remote place, hoping our taxi driver who had gotten us there would come back for us. He did finally, on Costa Rican time.