Tuesday, 26th January 2016
 
Today we again get kitted up as we are visiting Monteverde cloud forest reserve and dead on time, as per usual, our guide arrives to take us the 15 minutes to the park entrance. Graybing introduces himself to us and is a small round smiley faced Tico. He, like Donald has a tripod and Telescope and gives us binoculars for our use during the 3 hour trip. We hope to see various mammals, but within 5 minutes of entering the park, he is whooping like a child and running ahead shouting Olingo, Olingo! What we don't realise at that point is an Olingo is a nocturnal creature that is usually only seen after dark and for us to witness this at 7.30 am is phenomenal! For our guide to see this it is also amazing, as an Olingo is a large long tailed mammal, bigger than a house cat, in fact twice that size and they live in the tree branches of the upper canopy. Grabbing is just so happy and wherever we are after this, every guide is shocked we saw one in daylight.
We continue on and during the morning Peter spots a Moussarana Mountain snake just before the guide was about to step on it. We are shown a huge Owl dozing high up in the canopy, a fabulously interesting wasp, not at all like a British one, and the one bird which we were hoping to spot, the famous (In Costa Rica) the resplendent Quetzel! It's numbers are decline, again due to global warming, therefore it's quite rare. But it's a beautiful Turquoise and blue and iridescent red if you get close which of course we didn't. But it did stay high on a branch quite clearly for 5 minutes so we could view through Graybing's telescope and take photos as well as just looking at it. It is very beautiful. 
The one thing we've found through this wildlife spotting is the HUGE difference between walking in these forests on your own - you honestly wouldn't notice anything. If you have a guide between a group usually a dozen or more, you'd see more but wouldn't get a viewing through these amazing telescopes before the said creature has done a bunk! If you ever do visit a rain or tropical forest and can, do it just 2 or 3 of you with a guide it is totally wonderful. These folks find things you wouldn't see in a hundred visits on your own. Mainly, I think because the dozens of them talk amongst themselves, know where things are living, as most are territorial so know exactly where to look.
Today we have a very rare thing. A free afternoon, so for 30$ each we do a tour from our hotel. We are collected by minibus and transported up into the hills with 3 other travellers to the Coffee plantations. Monteverde coffee tour is sited in part of a 12 farm cooperative. Consisting mainly of the same family of brothers and sisters and their dear old Grandfather who started it all, who was still tilling the soil as we toured around. It's very much a 'Good life' type of affair. There are 2 pigs which they use to make methane gas to work the gas stoves, goats that eat the recycled plant fodder, chickens that provide them with eggs and eat the plant fodder that has been chopped up using a stationary bicycle. It was all very ingenious, but they have students stay and work on the plantation to understand the biodiversity. Locals pick the coffee beans which grow throughout the year in this fantastic climate. The vegetables and fruits are grown on a piece of land between huge tall trees to help stop the wind that blows always quite hard in this part of the world. We walked through the estate where Lemon and Orange trees are interspersed with coffee plants. We enjoyed a freshly picked Orange as reward maybe for our labours, Sergio one one the family, explained the coffee process whilst we picked the ripe 'Cherries' the name for the fruit. Inside these Cherries are the yellow beans, we skinned one and chewed on the beans, very sweet is the sap they sit in. There can be between 1, 2 or 3 beans in a cherry. Size didn't seem to come into the equation to me, it was totally random. But Sergio could pick them out easily. We spent about half an hour picking and discussing the pickers, who mainly come from Nicaragua, ( a bit like our Eastern Europeans in the Fens picking our vegetables, I guess) the Cooperative we understood, really cared about their workers and helping locals and the foreign workers as well as educating visitors. It was a fascinating tour and we even saw a sloth whilst enjoying our wander back to the educational rooms where we then tasted the coffee, in all 5 different roasts and with different preparation to understand the different processes. We eventually were driven back to our hotel after a very relaxed and enjoyable 4 hour wander into the coffee life of Costa Rica.