Venomous Snakes and Ziplining!

Currently, I am in Monteverde, a beautiful cloud forest inhabited by a good deal of biodiversity, Ticos (Costa Ricans) and, oddly enough, Quakers. Amy and I got here on the 3rd and have been frolicking in the rainforest ever since. But first things first: saying good-bye to Essence Arenal and El Castillo was hard. We felt so safe there and we want to go back. Our last day, we visited a Serpentarium, or a reptile museum down the road from our hostel. Our tour was led by Juan, a Tico about my age with an eyebrow ring and dreadlocks down to his thighs, who informed us that there are 135 species of snakes in Costa Rica, and of these, only 17 are venomous (still seems like a large number to me, lol). Juan let me, Amy, and three Belgian women hold a variety of nonvenomous snakes and lizards (well, he offered the reptiles to the Belgian women, but mostly they squealed and said, "No no no!"). He also showed us the multitude of poisonous snakes that are found in Costa Rica, including 4 kinds of coral snakes, sea snakes, 1 kind of neotropical rattlesnake, and a shit ton of pit vipers, who are named pit viper because of a 'pit' located behind their eyes that senses heat from prey. Pit vipers also have triangular wedges for heads and elliptical vertical pupils like cats. The two most abundant species are the eyelash palm-pit viper (has lacey scales over its eyes that look like eyelashes) and the Fer de lance (incredibly aggressive and poisonous and ALL OVER Costa Rica...yay!). Other species include the hognosed pit viper, the jumping pit viper, the bushmaster (the biggest viper on the PLANET), and the Godman's montane pit viper. Apparently, running into coral snakes is only a problem if they bite your toes or fingers, because their mouths only open 45 degrees and cannot wrap around bigger body parts. Vipers, on the other hand, can open their mouths a complete 180 degrees, meaning that they can bite you anywhere from the tip of your nose to your entire head. And they often live in trees; yay. We also petted a 240 pound boa constrictor named Elise, held these awesome green tree frogs with bright orange eyes and blue sides (but when they sleep, they cover up all their bright bits and totally look like green leaves...cool), and saw butterflies that are bright blue on one side and brown with eye-like spots on the other (this is so they look like owls and snakes when their wings are folded so that predators don't bother them). Then we moved on to a bunch of venomous tarantulas, and I got to hold one! Of course, this was only after Juan assured me that these spiders were used to being held and never bite humans, and if they did, the venom would make me sick rather than kill me. I was the only one dumb enough to partake in that activity, lol...Amy stood back and took pictures. :P

As cool as the tour was, one of the best parts was directly after. Amy had been telling Juan about how much she missed our dog and showed him a picture of her on the camera. Juan said, "She looks kind of like my dog!" and immediately ran up the street to fetch his dogs so they could comfort Amy. It was so sweet! I love Costa Ricans.

The next day, Amy and I took a Jeep-boat-Jeep trip to Monteverde. The only way to get to Monteverde from El Castillo besides take a 7 hour bus is to take a jeep to the lake, cross it in a boat, and then take another jeep up and down the extremely rough roads leading to Monteverde. Amy and I are actually staying in Cerroplano, a neighborhood in between Monteverde and Santa Elena. So far, we have purchased me a new pair of hiking boots (we went to a family-run shop in Santa Elena, where they only had random sizes in each kind of shoe--everyone, including a couple of five-year-olds, were scurrying around the shop looking for 8.5 hiking boots lol), eaten at a restaurant built like a giant treehouse, taken a canopy tour on a series of hanging bridges in the rainforest in which we spotted both howler monkeys and capuchin monkeys (the howler monkeys stuck around the longest and positioned themselves right above us--according to our guide, this was so they could shit on us), gone ziplining, and consumed fruity alcoholic beverages while watching an intense lightening storm on the 4th of July.

For those of you who have never ziplined, think of it as clinging to a pulley with a handle on it as it speeds across a cable 150-400 feet above the rainforest. Amy, ever the trooper, has a pronounced fear of heights. However, for some reason unknown to both of us, she selected me as a girlfriend; not only am i not afraid of heights, but i am also an adrenaline junkie (much to my parents' dismay). Due to the unfortunate combination of these conditions, Amy and I ended up on a zipline tour, and I'm fairly surprised that karma did not strike me down as Amy climbed onto the first zipline platform, the expression on her face so solemn that Medusa herself would have turned to stone upon looking at it. Even I was a bit nervous at this point: we had ridden up the mountain in a gondola and climbed about 8 stories on a bare bones metal platform, where it seemed that a strong gust of wind might surely send us plummeting into the rainforest below. But there was no plummeting--at least, no unplanned plummeting besides the initial descent in every zipline. We even got to do some tandem ziplines, where Amy and I rode down the zipline at the same time (something possessed me to yell "I love you!" every time we did one of these tandems, which may have been the reason that the guides kept asking Amy and I how we knew each other. Amy even admitted to having fun by the end of the 9 ziplines, although she also insisted that she felt no need to do it again. All in all, an excellent 4th of July. :)

written by  kfox on July 5, 2012 from Monte Verde, Costa Rica
from the travel blog: Costa Rica!
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