Day 5 – 4/30/19 Hanging Bridges and the Pacific Coast

The Mistico Hanging Bridges were only about 30 min from our hotel. I loved this place! My favorite so far! We did end up getting pretty wet but we were in a rain forest and it was worth it 😊. We saw so much lush vegetation, trees full of bromeliads, spider monkeys, frogs, snake, lots of birds, bats, a wild hog, carimundi (probably not spelling that right). Beautiful, beautiful! We divided into 3 groups – not too much of a walk, medium, and hard. I went with the hard group, which wasn’t that hard, and it was a steep down to the waterfall and back up. I think that was the only difference. We walked for 2 hours. We went across 10 hard (like metal or stone) and 6 hanging bridges.

Carimundi or something like that. About the size of a cat but more like a rat. Pointy nose to get into holes. Long tail.

Red froggy

They call this tree the broccoli tree because of how it looks.

Another shot or the broccoli tree. Beautiful canopy.

Venomous eyelash viper.

Mid picture you are looking down on another of the hanging bridges with people walking across.

That teensy red thing is a frog.

It started raining pretty hard after this and had to put the camera away.

Of course then it stopped raining and I got these last few shots. Such a beautiful area. When we were done our guide said it was like being in a hyperbaric chamber. 100% oxygen. Described it as the ‘lungs of the country’.

We the drove around Lake Arenal, the largest lake in Central America. It provides 60% of the hydroelectricity for the country. It was about a 2 hour drive to our lunch destination.

At the north end of the lake it is very windy and they harness wind power also. I know a lot of people don’t like the look of these wind machines, but I do.

Our chariot….

After lunch it was a 2.5 hour drive to out hotel. You could see the scenery drastically change from rainforest to ‘tropical dry forest’. Never heard of that term before.

Umbrella looking tree is a ficus tree.

You even see cactus out here.

The we arrive at the beautiful J W Marriot Resort Guanacaste.