Monteverde

This weekend was one of the best yet! We went to Monteverde on Saturday. We hiked through the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and when we hiked up into the clouds you could see the continental divide. The cloud forest is a type of rain forest that was much more dense and humid than any other forest we’ve been to so far. After the hike, we went to our hotel for dinner. It was gorgeous and called Fonda Vela. The room we stayed in was huge; there was a king size bed and another full bed, a sitting area and a bathroom and this was for 3 of us! The view from the room was really pretty as well. Afterwards we relaxed in some hot tubs and went to bed early because we had to get going on Sunday at 7am.


Sunday we went to the Selvatura Adventure Park where we did a canopy tour of the rainforest by ziplining. I was so terrified before the first zipline because of my fear of heights but I did it and it was really fun! It was cool to be able to just fly over and through a forest. The we did 13 ziplines, the last one was 1 km long. Afterwards we went and saw hummingbirds and butterflies of Costa Rica at the park.


We went back to our hotel for lunch and got back on the bus to head towards Guanacaste. On the way, we stopped at a coffee shop and learned about the process of Costa Rican coffee at Monteverde. The dark roast coffee at Monteverde is amazing, it is so smooth, almost chocolaty. I even bought some :)


We arrived at our next hotel that night and ate dinner. After dinner we went into the hot springs that the hotel had. There were 4 pools. The first with a slide and much cooler but the others were much warmer. The water is heated by the volcano which is just so cool. It was like being in a giant hot tub.
The next morning we went to Volcan Miravalles and went horseback riding. We stopped at a certain point and hiked up into a waterfall. This was so incredible. We were inside the waterfall, it was so beautiful. Afterwards, we rode the horses back and ventured off to the natural hot springs of the volcano that were muddy. First there was a 200 meter slide that we rode down a few times and afterwards went into the muddy hot springs. After we were all cleaned off we went back to the hotel for lunch and headed back to Santa Ana. I still can’t believe I am getting credit for this. In summary of this weekend: I hiked through the clouds, went ziplining, rode horses, hiked into a waterfall and relaxed in hot springs. This is the best semester ever.