Our first official excursion in Costa Rica was the rain forest hike w/ hanging bridges, waterfall and lunch. The tour was booked through our hotel when I first made the reservation online. This was day 2. My official birthday day. I didn't read too much into what all was going to happen except I was going to see an amazing waterfall and some really cool hanging bridges and get to hike in a rain forest. I mean, this was going to be the best birthday ever! I was hoping to see some wildlife too but was going to take whatever I got. I had no idea really where we were going, just knew it was in the area and they were picking us up from the front of our hotel at 8 am. Yaris, our guide, was super sweet. Luckily they kept our group small, 8 of us plus the guide and driver, with 4 of us from the states.

We drove around Lake Arenal on the other side of the dam to pull into our first stop, Mistico Park. The park is in the rain forest and before we began our hike Shane and I had to sign waivers because we opted to hike in our Chacos (closed toed water hiking shoes). Apparently the ants are so bad that they will not even let you into the park with sandals or flip flops on, but if you have closed toed shoes with any openings you have to sign a liability waiver. Shane and I spent the entire time (and basically the rest of the trip) hyper aware of those little bastards and constantly on the look out and on the move to make sure we NEVER got bit by one. We met people who did, it wasn't pretty.

As you can tell from the photo above, we began our hiking in some overcast, cooler weather with some misting raining.

We started off in our rain ponchos and stripped them on and off several times. It went from misting to blazing humidity, to sunny and back 20 times in the 2 hours we hiked here. pretty much the whole trip was like that, Sunny, then rainy, then sunny...mostly sunny, mostly cloudy, all within an hour.

This is where the moisture gave me some fits. I also had my old DSLR professionally cleaned before the trip and they messed up my white balance settings some how that I had saved that also caused some issues during this hike, sigh, that I did not notice right away. Honestly though, my iphone 7 plus is waterproof and it really rocked a lot of the time.

We spotted these guys right away. The smell like onions. Peccary look like pigs but are not pigs.

Our favorite tree is the Dragon's Blood tree. It will literally bleed a red sap if you cut it. It works as a medicinal ointment for cuts, burns and bites. It can be also used for mouth sores and cavities in small doses. It is easy to spot because of is roots that tend to grow up out of the ground. Howler monkeys like to climb these trees.

What you are looking at above is a massive ant hill of those bastard red ants. This is huge by my standards but is tiny compared to the giant warehouse sized ones we saw that lines the trails we hiked. I was terrified to touch anything and refused to stop moving my feet whenever our guide would stop to talk and point things out. I can still feel my skin crawl thinking about them. And those aren't even the bullet ants that are even worse!

This entire wall is an anthill!

The reason I signed up for this hike to begin with was for the hanging bridges. I really wanted to see them. We could hear Howler Monkeys and spotted a Sloth way up in a tree while we were walking across them. They were a little spooky and if you had too many people they would shake like mad.

 The mist of the rain in the forest was other worldly.

The photo above does not look like much but 1/3 to the right and in the middle coiled up in the center of 2 large leaves is an eyelash viper. one of the most deadliest snakes in Costa Rica! See if you can spot it.

We loaded back up on the bus, now that the sun had decided to stick around for more than 10 minutes and we headed to our next adventure. The La Fortuna waterfall. Once we arrived we changed into bathing suits and got ready to hike down into the canyon.

This was right before I got swept away by the force of the waterfall and pushed into the rocks off the the side and was a little shaken up.

These were the rocks I was pushed into.

I wish we would have had more time to have stayed here. There were trails through an orchard garden i would have liked to have explored but the hike back up about killed us. Seriously the hardest hike I had ever done in my life, ever. Possibly because we had 20 minutes to catch the bus to lunch. Lunch was at The Springs Hotel. It was a nice buffet lunch. We were pretty spent after this. I was really happy I opted to not continue on to do the Volcano hike that was after lunch. We just went back to our hotel and meandered around the grounds and relaxed in the hot springs with a cold drink at the swim up bar and took advantage of making my shy husband do all the things in the name of my birthday.

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