Into The Jungle

Big Tree
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Well... After updating you on our trip to Liberia. We exited the internet Cafe to find a driver waiting to take us to Rinconcito Lodge. It was quite a bumpy ride - to seemingly nowhere - we started thinking what is stopping this guy from pulling over to the side of the road and burying us, but the road was so long and bad we figured he would have done that way earlier if those were his intentions.

We got to the lodge had our first Costa Rican meal of rice and beans and setup to take a tour in the jungle with our non-English speaking guide who's name is Alfonso, but everyone calls Primo.  We were soon to find out why they call this guy Primo because he is the freaking man.  Within 5 minutes of the tour, where the other tourists said they didn't see any animals, he showed us a couple monkeys swinging from the trees and posing for our camera.  He also showed us a bunch of awesome birds (and even what we think was a toucan but it flew away to soon), how to know which birds sound like what, weird racoon animal thingie (that is the official name believe it or not), snakes (the first one Primo actually stepped on and I was the one to notice), and the home of a boa constrictor. One bird he tried to show us, but was hidden by tress, so he threw a rock into the trees, but we think he through it a little too good because we heard two thuds and the bird never came up.  oh well....

Killing one bird with one stone

Hiking through the jungle rivers
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In the non-wildlife department he showed us these mud pots that were basically big ditches of splurting 192 degree mud along with different parts of the trail where hot burning air was just bursting out of holes in the ground.  We also went to some hot springs and waded a little in there (we wanted to get all the way in but our travel advisor who gave us vaccination's voice was in both of our heads still).  Anyway, it was an awesome day, I think we walked like 22 km, and then we headed back for a shower and dinner where we saw our last animal of the day....ticks.  Yeah, it kind of was not so great.  We picked them all off, a little traumatized, but the owner of the lodge assured us they are not dangerous here and our vaccinationist never said anything, so we feel pretty good about it...but this helped us decide that maybe we should take a break from the jungle and go drown any extra ticks at the beach.  We were recommended to go to Montezuma which is supposed to be amazing, but there was another beach Tamarindo which is supposed to be more touristy, but was only one bus away.  We decided we could go for something easier and heard there are not that many tourists around at this time in general so decided to go to Tamarindo.

Hot Mud!
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We have lots of pics and will upload them soon, promise! Till next time....