Oh, you want to know about the other 30 per cent? Let’s just say I seemed to be sitting in the raft’s unmarked ejector seat, and it was activated every time we went over even a 2ft drop. Certainly, I gave the watching howler monkeys something to howl about from their grandstand seats in the bankside trees, but I’m also sure I was the one with the widest smile at the end of a day so giddily fun, it could give “eco activities” a good name.
In between adventures, I calmed things down with tours of coffee and chocolate plantations, dolphin-watching and that ultimate anti-adrenalin pastime, the traditional local pottery demonstration (it crossed the line from soothing to stultifying when they brought out an ocarina. I did not stay to listen).
Taking the literal, if not moral, high ground, I pushed on to Monteverde and its sky walk. Here, a path has been carved out of the cloud forest – somehow both weaving around its tangled, tumbled roots and soaring amongst its treetop canopy.
Animal magic
Between the two, our guide, José, introduced us to such splendidly named locals as the tink frog, the cat-eyed snake and the blue morpho, but it was the tip of a tropical iceberg: passing a mighty ceiba tree, he mentioned casually that it was 600 years old, had 7,000 other plants growing on it, and was home to 400 different species.
The blue morpho turned out to be a particularly exquisite butterfly, its wings the same rich cyan as the Rio Celeste pool, but with the colour saturation setting turned up to 11. It takes more than some fancy neon colouring to stand out in Monteverde’s butterfly house, though: here, there are thousands of the lovely creatures flitting about – “It’s like butterfly Tinder,” said José. “They find mates really quickly. So they actually die sooner than they would in the wild,” he adds. (Perhaps not surprising when they mate for 25 hours at a time…)
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/central-america/costa-rica/country-will-bring-sense-adventure-even-cowardly-visitor/
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Publish date : 2022-09-19 03:00:00
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