Sunday, November 20

Woke up around 7 am. Not a bad sleep after a nice hike yesterday and the hot springs last night. We head out around 8 to see if we can check into our new hotel. It's a yes. It was not booked last night. We decide to have breakfast first. We find a nice spot where Ron orders an American breakfast, you can probably figure out what that would look like and I order fruits, granola, and yogourt. They generally serve the same fruits: banana, pineapple, watermelon, and papaya. It was a good size and tasty. Ron enjoyed his meal as well. We return to our first hotel to pick up our bags and head out walking. It's only about 5-7 minutes. We get ourselves organized, I wash some underwear for us and a few t-shirt, the we return to chat with the guy at the front desk to get info and book some tours. He is very helpful and voici what we have planned: today, we will take a cab to the local waterfall. It's 6 km away and all uphill. We plan on walking back down. It's rainy so we'll see how things go. Secondly, we book a tour for tomorrow. We will go for a,hike and a visit to Rio Celeste. We are taking a chance that conditions will be ok. The waters in these falls is sup posed to be an amazing colour of blue. Unfortunately during rainy season when there is a lot of rain in consecutive days, the water can turn brown. Well, it's been raining for a while here. Long range weather looks promising for tomorrow. Let's hope it stays that way. Weather patterns have a mind of there own out here in the rain forests. Thirdly, we book a shuttle van to take us to the cost on Tuesday where we booked the condo for six days.

Take a closer look. Do you see it?

Saw this beauty in the butterfly garden.

A look out point for the falls.

The power of the water hitting. 

Nearing the falls.

A smaller cascade on the other side.

People were in the water but you tell that it was quite cool. We were already wet from the rainfall so could have gone in but we didn't. We hung around for about 30 minutes checking it all out then started heading up. It took about 8-10 minutes to walk down and a good 15 minutes to come back up. A nice little workout. There were lots of noises in the trees but we only saw a few hummingbirds fluttering by. I had binoculars and still couldn't find anything. On this trip I'm sure that Ron has shot about a hundred pictures of plants. Here are some of them.

Fan palms

Not sure of the species

Papayas. There was a huge area of trees and fruit. 

A lot of flowers seem to be orange/red in colour.

Pineapple 

Maybe a banana flower.

We also saw birds, but on our walk back, only a few in the waterfall area.

Saw this little one all along the way home. Could be a variety of Tanager. 

A Grey hawk 

It was pouring rain when I took this one. 

Also on our walk back we noticed an arena looking like a small bull ring. We asked the guy at the hotel and he said that bull fights no longer exist but that people do go in the ring with Bulls, just for fun. The bull doesn't get killed but sometimes people do!! 

Name of the arena

Guy selling fruit this morning on the Main Street.

We hung out for a few hours, showered and went out for an early supper around 5:45. We ended not choosing very well. The restaurant was well attended so maybe we just didn't order the right meals. I had pizza and Ron had mushroom chicken. It's really telling when the mushrooms come from a can. Yuck! We had a beer to wash it down then we walked around as Ron was hoping to find a bakery for dessert. Funny enough there doesn't seem to be many of them in this town. We did happen upon one and bought a cinnamon bun to share. We also bought some crafted chocolate made in the area. I only allowed Ron to eat three small squares otherwise it would have disappeared in a few mouthfuls.  We got back to our room shortly after seven. We have a tv here so watching 60 minutes for now. I'm sure Ron will find something interesting to watch later. Another early night as we have to have breakfast and get ready to leave by 8:00am. Good night all.