I’m posting these pictures from the suburbs of San Jose, but we started this morning walking around with our necks craned trying to spot monkeys, birds, and sloths high up in the coastal jungle canopy.
I found the spectacle of it all just as entertaining as the carefully curated experience of manufactured adventure itself. Our guide’s enthusiasm for every species of any kind we encountered — from fluorescent lichen to the national tree of Nicaragua — was infectious. You couldn’t help but get carried away with everyone else.
Swipe to the very end to see two very cute subjects of our enraptured attention.
Yesterday, we went on a riverboat tour of the mangrove “ecotone” around Damas Island near Manuel Antonio National Park, where freshwater and the ocean meet in the most incredible ways–both in terms of ecological adaptations like plants figuring out how to flush out all that salt they absorb, as well as more viscerally and visually, in the comingling of waters of different colors and roughness at confluences as solid as any demarcation line. It blew my urban monkey mind.
We saw a lot of wildlife (swipe to see a couple critters), but even in the dead time, I felt incredible peace just bobbing along the water. I was sighing contentedly almost nonstop.
Swipe to the very end to see our guide, Alvin — “the chipmunk,” he was quick to add.
We saw a couple of crocs going stealth mode in their typically elusive ways, but the stars of the show were the “white faced” or capuchin monkeys. Swipe to see a couple I managed to capture with my dinky old Canon Powershot. These were the first I’d seen but certainly not the last! This morning, a whole troupe swarmed our hotel as we were checking out. They’re cute little buggers but can get pretty aggressively klepto, so don’t get too friendly…