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TOPICS OF INFORMATION FROM THE WEBSITE:

Fascinating places to visit for the tourist or ecotraveler:

Straddling the Continental Divide at 1440 meters* (4662 ft), the Santa Elena and Monteverde cloud forest area offers one of the most interesting place to visit in Costa Rica. In this Costa Rica rainforest are found more than 100 species of mammals including 5 species of cats, over 400 species of birds including 30 kinds of hummingbirds, tens of thousands of insect species (over 5000 species of moths) and 2,500 species of plants  (420 kinds of orchids). The area is acclaimed as one of the most outstanding wildlife refuges in the New World Tropics.

 

The astonishing biodiversity of the cloud forest of Monteverde... 

 

The Butterfly Project web: www.best.com/~mariposa

Monarch butterfly in its winter habitat

Cerro Amigos  

A free hiking option in Monteverde is the dirt road up to Cerro Amigos (1840 meters), the highest peak in the area.

Casem Handicrafts Cooperative

Hidden Valley Trail 

Hummingbird Gallery - Gallery Colibri

Monteverde Ceramics Centre

Orchid Garden of Monteverde

Serpentario Monteverde

 

And lots more!

My daughter Ellen, who supervises flower breeding in Costa Rica for a seed company, invited me to join her last February in Costa Rica for both work and play! We spent a couple of days at her work station, which was fascinating, and then headed for the active volcano Arenal and the nearby rainforest, and then the cloud forest at Monteverde. It was a totally fascinating experience! The volcano's nighttime glow and daytime smoke trail were obscured by the rain that falls so often east of the divide, but the cloud forest, which is on the western slope, was breath-takingly beautiful! Our guide even found us a quetzal, among other things, catching the image, far, far above us in a towering tree, magnified in his telescopic lens - a rare experience! Ellen took a lot of pictures with her husband's digital camera, and has begun transmitting them to me, a complicated process! Here is one of them. Exotic, huh?

 

White orchid

 

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This picture was taken at a restaurant which puts out papaya for the birds.

 

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Notice path below for scale of the tree trunk,...,.........

 

Except for the lively eco-touristic enterprise that (among other businesses) makes San Jose like most other modern cities, Costa Rica's countryside is still remarkably unspoiled, primitive. As you head west and upward, the roads are unimproved - and most of them unpaved. Lots of coffee plantations. The use of horses for farming and hauling is very frequent, even teams of oxen, used as organic tractors, and the country people seem almost untouched by the curses and blessings of modernity. But almost every one of them is highly knowedgeable and enlightened on the subject of the conservation of their precious ecological wonders! Here's another one of Ellen's pictures, taken along the highway. He was a BIG GUY!! ... but didn't seem very aggressive.

 

This was one of the most enjoyable trips I have taken in many years! I don't know if all the tour companies are as good as ours was, but I'll bet they are! My only worry is that more popularity for tourists of the pleasures and wonders of Costa Rica might end by destroying its uniqueness! It is encouraging to me, however, that so many Costa Ricans themselves realize the same thing!

 

But visit the site before you go! It will give you just about everything you need.

 

http://www.monteverdeinfo.com/

 

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