We had to get up at 2:30am to get our flight out of New York (I was stoked about that), so we arrived in San Jose in the morning but we booked on an afternoon bus to Monteverde or 'The cloud rainforest'. The bus stop was located at a Dennys restaurant (Grand slam, hot fudge cake, and oreo sundae - yes that Dennys) a couple of kilometres from the airport so to get there we had to pretend we were staying at the Holiday Inn and get on their shuttle bus (the hotel is located next door to Dennys) and started our 5 hour wait for the bus. There are worst places to wait, at least they had oreo sundaes and bottomless diet coke. The bus took 3.5 hours along very windy and mostly unpaved roads. Even after all those hours in the bus, I'm still not convinced on what side the road they are supposed to drive on!

Our first night here we went to a local restaurant for dinner and booked in a canopy (zipline) tour of the forest and a night walk through the forest for the following day.

Day 2 - Adventure day.

We woke up to crazy winds in the morning, though our hostel owner ensured me that this would make the zip lining more fun, not more dangerous. 'You will blow around all over the place' - yes that is just what I want when I'm 60/70m in the air!

The zip lining involved cabling from tree to tree and was a great way to the amazing rainforest (well if Sarah wasn't too scared to look around as I was). Jolly did the 'Tarzan swing' (I chickened out) where he jumped off a 40m high platform, free falling for 3 or 4 seconds and then swinged around for another 30 secs or so. He screamed like a wee girl the whole time.

Later in the evening we headed of for a guided night walk of the rainforest, most of the animals are nocturnal so this is the best time to see them. It started off really well - we were meters away from a beautiful sloth. They live in the tree tops so to see one at eye level and so close is extremely rare, they only come down once a week to pee and poop, our guide said in 9 years he's only seen one this close a handful of times. Next was a porcupine, (which kind of looked like a monkey, it live only in the treetops and swings from its tail like a monkey!) and after that it went downhill - insects, a tarantula and a viper snake (most dealy in Costa Rica). Also we saw some ants that Jolly took a liking to, so he wants to write about them. Here is Jolly: We came across some amazing ants on our night tour, they had a colony about 5 meters square which apparently goes a few meters under ground, these are the ants you see all carrying little leaves on there backs walking in a line, they are amazing. There are 3 types of ants in these colonys. The workers that travel up to a kilometer each way to carry the leaves, they are about the size or normal NZ ants, then there are these tiny ants about a third of the size riding on each leaf, there job is to rid the leaves of any bacteria or fungus that will harm the crop and lastly soldier ants that patrol the routes fighting off enemies and dragging things out of the way, these are about 6 times the size of the workers. Its really amazing, and what they do with all these leaves is take them into the colony where they have farmes, they lay all the leaves out and a fungus grows on them and they eat the fungus, amazing huh!

Day 3 - Adventure day 2

Although we are not hikers, we bought hiking boots for this trip and Jolly is determined to use them. So today we hiked up to the highest point in the mountains. Which was straight uphill for 3 hours. I'm not sure if this is the stuff normal hikers do but it was painful. It was so steep that coming down took as look at going up! We didn't quite reach the summit as we got swarmed by bumble bees and I freaked out and ran away. I think this was a blessing in disguise though as on the way down we saw a troop of monkeys swinging through the trees - including one very cute little baby (who wasn't that good at swinging and fell down a few times). According to our night guide it is quite rare to see monkeys here because they stay away from people so we were pretty pleased with ourselves!

Next stop - La Fortuna, which you can actually book a consultation with an 'Adventure Consultant', or relax in thermal hot springs and see an active volcano. I know what I'm voting for.