Our last excursion on our way out of the Lake Arenal area was to a town called Monteverde. We knew this was over a two hour ride and so we decided to do it as a stop on our way back to San Jose instead of driving two hours back to the Arenal area. San Jose is the capital and that is where we are heading to catch the shuttle out of Costa Rica.

We were quite happy to leave the insect house. We got out as early as possible. I wanted to leave at 7:00 a.m., but we pulled out of the driveway just before 8. The first 45 minutes of the drive was fine. Still the winding roads, but it was paved....until it wasn't. The next hour and fifteen minutes were excruciating. Now there's unpaved and there's ridiculous. Monteverde is a famous ecotourist destination. The town attracts a ton of tourists who come to hike in the national cloud forest park, take canopy tours, visit the butterfly gardens, and explore bat and hummingbird galleries. So we were having a hard time imagining all of these people traveling on this road. Parts were somewhat smooth dirt, but much of it was just rocks, large rocks...and this was improved in the past few years! Part of the problem was that we were one of only a handful of vehicles that weren't four wheel drive. You can only drive about 20 kilometers an hour over the rough parts. I seriously thought we'd lose a tire or two. On the plus side, the views from the side of the road were amazing.

Not much in terms of a guard rail...just under 5,000 ft elevation.

Monteverde was founded as a town in the 1950's by some Quakers and pacifists fleeing the draft of the Korean War. Not sure how they all got up there then. They liked the area for dairy farming and the political peace. Prior to that, there was a Creole population settled in that area and well before that, Spaniards and a tribe of Clovis Native Americans.

Now there is a town in the shape of a triangle (about a city block) and those roads are paved. That central part hosts the usual touristy things like shops, hostels, restaurants, tour agencies, etc. The only part we were interested in was the cloud forest.

The weather was great. Nice and cool. The trails were nice and the scenery was amazing. We made it to the continental divide which separates the Caribbean side from the Pacific side. The plant life was unreal. The plants get all their nutrients from the moisture of the clouds. There are 2,500 different types of plants and 420 of those are orchids. Again, we didn't hire a guide to point them all out to us. We enjoyed walking the trails and looking around, and snapped pictures at our leisure (Liam was still annoyed at the people who hired guides and took over the trail). Some parts of the trail had us winded as we hiked uphill, but at the end, near the continental divide, it was all worth it. I took a ton of pictures. I'll attach what I consider to be the best. Maeve also has more 'path pictures' in her blog section at the end of 'Costa Rica'.

You can see why it's called a cloud forest

There was one more suspension bridge to tackle as well. The payoff after that was another lovely waterfall.

We walked for about two and a half hours. What a beautiful area. Worth the drive? I'd say absolutely! The route out had about half of the unpaved road as the one in. That would have been nice to know beforehand.

One section of the trail that went uphill for quite a while

A small view from the restaurant of one of the paved roads on the 'triangle' of downtown Monteverde

We stopped for lunch in town after the hike