Costa Rica - More Fortuna
I forgot a few items from Fortuna, so I'll add them here. First, what I think is a great shot:
Notes on food! I began to eat mostly beans-and-rice based foods here, ordering either the "casados pollo" or the "tipical" meals off of menus. It usually consisted of chicken cooked in salsa, white rice, and either black or pinto beans. Lunch / dinner was often served with a salad of sorts, sometimes with plain farmer's cheese. The hotel "tipical" breakfast was an onion, rice and red bean mixture, tortillas, scrambled eggs, farmer's cheese, and fried plaintains. I really liked these basic meals.
On the way to the boat trip, we saw many plantations:
- papaya plantations
- sugar cane
- banana
- pineapple
- yucca
The hotel restaurant had a talking green Amazon parrot named Margaritta:
She would walk around the restaurant floor all day, screeching and talking and jabbering away, occassionally saying her name. If we tried to talk to her, she'd run to a cabinet and close herself inside.
The last night we were in Fortuna we went to the Baldi hotsprings. It's a naturally fed series of pools which a resort has grown around. They have something like 20 different pools of different temperatures, a poolside restaurant and an in-pool wet bar. Later in the evening the lights and music cut out suddenly, leaving the entire place pitch black. This lasted about a minute, followed by two sharp bangs or explosions. These shook me up a bit, because it sounded a helluva lot like gunfire. Nope, turns out it was just a birthday celebration. They left the lights out and turned the music back on. You could hear drunk frat kids singing and running all over the place. I was pleased that we were scheduled to leave at that point.
Our last morning in Fortuna we went to a little wildlife refuge. It's not enclosed, but simply a little piece of protected forest with some pools and a staff (well, the butterfly enclosure is enclosed). We saw lots of things:
- shiny blue butterflies
- owl butterflies
- two-toed sloth
- wild basilisks
- more caiman
- wild poison arrow frog! Katy found it, and it made me super happy
- cinnamon trees, which I scratched and smelled like cinnamon
- Poisonous snaked enclosures, which were supposed to have vipers, but one was unlocked and a bit ajar, with no snake. We were leaving then anyway.
Also, the maids in the hotel made us hilarious towel animals: