Cahuita National Park

The weather having improved quite a bit in the last few days, we went to visit the Cahuita National Park, a half an hour away by bus. The Park is along the coast and protects both near shore habitats and the coral reef that is just offshore. It is always great to expect little and get more! The Lonely Planet wasn’t very talkative about the park other than about the coral it was protecting and it did not seem very popular.

The trail followed the coastline in the rainforest and wildlife was not very shy… 2 minutes in and we already had spotted a yellow viper on the side of the trail. It was very still and had ants around its mouth, so it might have been dead, but then again, its eyes were very open and looking really mean…

Five minutes later, we were in the middle of a group of howler monkeys. They were up in the trees and kept their distance (sort of) but apparently did not care at all about our presence.

As we walked along, there was plenty more wildlife to see, including blue morpho butterflies, nasty-looking spiders, sloths, and more monkeys.

In addition to the howlers, there were also a lot of white-face monkeys (“Marcel” for the Friends buffs); now these were definitely not shy, they were actually interested in people! Well, actually they were not so much interested in people as in their potential as food source…

They had figured out that cameras and camera bags had no food so they didn’t pay too much attention to us, but a lady that walked by with a small pack of crackers in her hand got it stolen quickly! (There were signs telling people not to feed the monkeys, but obviously that did not do much good because the monkeys knew very well what looked like food and how to open plastic wraps.) That made for an entertaining hike though!

Along the way we met a French couple; the guy must have been some sort of field biologist because he’s ability to find wildlife was phenomenal… Every other step he found something: from the sloths perfectly camouflaged in the trees to the pink viper hidden under a bush… very helpful!

Find the sloths (2)...

After four hours of hiking, we were worn out, but the day was far from over… after a good typical Costa Rican casado lunch, we set out to wait for the bus…. Two and a half hours later, it finally came! Apparently, there was a broken bridge somewhere, which delayed three buses… So we finally got home that night around 9:30 pm!