Insects and Bugs
Trip Start
Sep 29, 2007
1
45
221
Trip End
Ongoing
Monteverde,
Costa Rica
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Did the jeep-boat-jeep journey from Arenal to Santa Elena, Monteverde because to go around the hills would have been a nightmare. The roads are unpaved. There was a clear shot of Volcan Arenal as clouds parted and it put on a show just as we were leaving on the boat.
Still have the watermelon!
Seatbelts have been invented in Costa Rica unlike in other Centro America where they are non-existent or stolen to make artificial hair braids.
As soon as we arrived we booked into Monteverde Backpackers, cheap and a little nasty as we had to share our room with some Americans and a boy from Cupar, Scotland (mums home town) who partied hard and trashed the room.
We visited the Monteverde Butterfly Gardens. There were not many butterflies out in the gardens but lots of bugs and insects in a room. There were Tarantulas, Hercules Beetles, Caterpillars, jewelled scarabs, giant cockroaches, Rhino Beetles, Praying mantis, slugs and moth and buuterfly cocoons plus lots of mariposa chrysallis they had collected which i found very interesting. The ranger took all the creepy crawlies out and passed them around, very cool place. I was hugely impressed and could have stayed much longer. They had a huge Golden Orb spider in it's web which they had framed with wood as though it was a piece of art..... and it was. They also had a leaf cutter ant colony and the nest was exposed through clear plastic so you could view the ants as they would be underground, hard at work carrying leaves to feed the funghus they feed on. Well done on that display. Amazing little cities the ants create.
We cooked tonite as we have a big day tomorrow, scary too because we are zip lining.
