Tag: Cloud Forest

From Playa del Coco, we took a shuttle bus to Monteverde. We decided not to brave the public buses on this occasion because catching a bus at 7:30am and getting to the hotel after dark didn’t sound fun. In a particularly un-Costa Rican fashion, the bus arrived 25 minutes early – rudely interrupting a nice breakfast we were having with our AirBnB host. So we got our egg sandwiches to go and hopped on the shuttle. It was still about a 3 hour trip, including a stop to stretch our legs and get a nice view of some scarlet macaws. One thing I’m learning about Costa Rica is that there’s some amazing wildlife, and some of the best sightings are where you least expect them.

I’ve heard a fair number of complaints about the roads to Monteverde, and yes they’re bad, but so are all the roads in Costa Rica, and the scenery was nice. The shuttle driver pulled over for a quick rest and photo op:

So we made it there without incident. Strictly speaking, we were staying in Santa Elena, not Monteverde. However, you could reasonably be confused by the fact that half the businesses in Santa Elena have “Monteverde” in the name. Monteverde is sort of a separate town about a whopping 15 minute walk away. Santa Elena is the slightly larger of the two and has the majority of the shops, restaurants, and inns, whereas Monteverde is a little ritzier and has the high end hotels, a couple restaurants, a lot of handmade craft shops, and best of all, some true amazing views of the Gulf of Nicoya.  But the whole area gets called Monteverde, oh and there are the Mondeverde and Santa Elena nature reserves, the most famous of which is Monteverde, which is probably why the whole thing is named the way it is.

The first thing I noticed about the area was the lush greenery, emphasis on lush. The jungle is a “cloud forest,” meaning that clouds roll through and mist the area a couple times a day. On the ground, there was a lot of emerald green plants with huge leaves, and the trees usually had a healthy coating of moss, bromeliads, and vines. The jungle comes right to the edge of town, and sometimes spills out on to vacant lots.

Santa Elena is definitely a tourist town. It’s littered with hostels, hotels, restaurants, and little shuttle vans delivering visitors to the various activities in the area. There are a few pretty good restaurants around, and the high point, at least as far as ambiance goes, was the “Tree House,” which was actually a restaurant built around a tree. Very cool, but a little pricey, so that was definitely a sometimes treat.

There were also a few coffee shops selling locally grown coffee, and a beer house and taco bar that featured local craft beers, which was a nice change from the standard fare. Anyway, plenty of places to keep you fueled up for whatever adventure you were off to or returning from. But that’s really the point of staying there – going out and exploring. While Elani and I were there, we hiked two of the cloud forest nature reserves, did two zip line tours and a night wildlife walk, and went on a coffee/chocolate/sugar tour to relax. All of them were great. I’ll go into those more in future posts. Monteverde was a pretty action packed stop!