Barefoot Children in the Rain

View of Arenal from our hotel room.

By 8AM Kayla and I had packed a small bag of stuff to bring to Monteverde with us and left the rest of our stuff packed safely in our car. We then climbed into the shuttle van and made our way towards the boat launch.  It took us just under an hour to cross Lake Arenal, but the boat trip was very mellow and we saw great views of the Arenal Volcano.

Volcano from the boat

When we finally crossed the lake, we were surprised to find out that we had another hour and a half of driving ahead of us. Obviously, we didn't do our research. Upon arriving to the town, we were dropped off at the sunset hotel.

A quick glimpse of Nicoya peninsula from the shuttle.

We set up camp and headed straight to downtown. Kayla and I ended up spending the afternoon wandering through shops and making plans of our day. We decided to go to the serpentarium at sunset because Kayla's goal of the trip was to see a fer- de- lance snake. While there, we saw both an adult  and a baby fer- de- lance and I even held a dead one. I was amazed to learn that this snake gives live birth to an average of 25 snakes. We also saw a variety of pit vipers, coral snakes and some venomous snakes. We learned a lot about the local snake species and I now know they are scarier than I thought.

Fer- de- lance

Coral Snake

Box turtle

Holding a large fer- de- lance

Brown basilisk lizard

Eye-lash viper

We rounded our trip out by going on a tour. During the tour, we were lucky enough to see a kinkajous (which looks like a lemur), cool spiders, a sleeping rainbow toucan and 2 pit vipers. The tour was one of my highlights of the whole trip. Our guide was so knowledgeable, I could have gone on multiple more tours and not gotten bored. I have a new found passion for the Costa Rican rain forest.

Green pit viper

Another pit viper

We got back to the hotel just before midnight and we once again were going to need to be up early because we have a early boat trip back.