Today I’m happy to kick off a review of our latest travel adventure – this time to Costa Rica! The aim here was to not only see the rain forest, but also to check out the huge variety of wildlife that live there – particularly birds. Let’s get started!
Our trip started at the San Jose airport with an unfortunate rental car adventure. The company we had a reservation with gave up our car because we were “more than half an hour late”… Not great. After running around a bit to find a last minute alternative (at a price of course), we headed out to La Fortuna where we stayed for the first half of the trip. Fortunately the Airbnb check in was much more smooth, and our place was lovely. We quickly headed to bed and woke up ready to start our trip for real.
Our first stop was the Mistico hanging bridges tour. This tour was really an incredible introduction to the primary forest and some of the wildlife we had hoped to see. The guide pointed out all kinds of things that we certainly would have missed, and gave us lots of great information about the forest.
The hike itself was not too hard. The pace was relaxed and there were plenty of stops. It did take quite a while with all the stops to admire the views from the bridges. Though this park is known for the bridges, I would not say they were the highlight of the tour for me. They gave you a good perspective of the canopy, but there was so much going on down below that it was incredible to look around along the entire trail, both for the plant life and the animals.
Costa Rica is famous in birding circles for the diversity it has to offer. I am no birder, but they were still a special sight. There were a variety of colorful visitors that we saw on the trail. We didn’t see any of the famous birds we had heard about (yet), but they were still a lot of fun to watch.
I could keep going on for a while about everything we saw on this walk through the woods, but I’ll let the photos do the rest of the talking. It was a very worthy first stop in the country and we were excited to continue the action for the rest of the trip.
Taken 2/11/23
