Today is a big day! None of our activities require us to wear a helmet!
On today's agenda: the hanging bridges, a chocolate plantation tour and massages.
To start, Jen, Lisa and I headed over to Mistico Park for the 2 1/2 hour hanging bridge tour. Muma chose to hang at the pool. Very proud of Jen for putting aside her fear of heights to go! Here's an overview:
We stopped to take pictures with the volcano behind us.
We had some great views to start
We decided, if the tour got to long, we should have a code word to say let's leave the group and go it ourselves. We chose 'Grover needs to fly'.
We met our tour guide Bernardo who told us there were 16 bridges total; 10 smaller bridges and 6 high suspension bridges. The smaller bridges were nothing
Jen was a trooper!
Grover loved the bridges.
Along the way Bernardo pointed out some plant and animal life.
Black Mandible toucan
700 year old tree
The broom like walking Palm tree roots
Central American Whip tail lizard
A yellow viper snake
This scary giant spider (second largest in country)
A Jeaus Christ lizard
And we saw this hummingbird sitting on its egg (picture taken through the telescope Bernardo brought along).
All in all, while it was a long tour, we were glad we had done guided instead of walking through on our own. Bernardo was able to point out a lot of things we never would have seen (including one sloth who sadly was hidden a bit so we only saw his little furry butt).
Grover had fun though walking the bridges with us and being one with nature
And we did get to walk down to a waterfall too!
Here are some pictures of the view from some of the bridges
If you look close, one of the bridges we walked over already is in this:
Finally Lisa wanted to make sure I put in a comment about the bird nerd. The guy who was identifying birds by sound. As we got going he was asking questions. As Beenardo walked past us to go back to see what the guy was talking about one time, he said (somewhat under his breath), "guess this guy like birds". Here's him and Jen checking out some, you guessed it, birds!
While I'm pretty sure we all wanted to say "Grover wants to fly" many times along the way I'm glad we stuck with it.
When we left the bridges we headed back to the hotel to pick up Muma then headed into town for lunch and souvenir shopping.
This is downtown LaFortuna
After we headed to the chocolate plantation. We were going to be a bit early and this was good as the road we were supposed to take was closed so we had to find an alternate route. Junior navigator Jen pulled out the map and found us a new way to go.
Since we had time, and were in the area, we drove past and went to get a picture of the horse parking lot
The. It was off to chocolate plantation
Carlos was our guide and told us about the history of chocolate and how it's made
These are the cocoa bean trees and beans
They also grow other plants like bananas and peppers to help make money until the trees mature and help provide some shade.
We were shown how to crack open alto see the seeds
The seeds from day one (lower right) counterclockwise to 7 days.
The beans left out in the sun to dry
Roasting the beans
Grinding the beans
The mixed the powder with sugar and water to make hot chocolate
Then we got to taste chocolate with various flavors
A very delicious tour to say the least. The chocolate was very bitter to start from the bean but got better as the process continued.
After the tour we headed back to the hotel and headed to the pool where Jen was able to get her BBC (her Costa Rican drink of choice)😀
At 6:15 Lisa and I left Jen and Muma in the pool and headed to the spa for our chocolate massages.
Now what we expected was for each of us to have a very relaxing cocoa butter massage. What we got was very unexpected.
First of all, when Muma made the reservation for us, she said "my daughter and her friend want to schedule chocolate massages". They booked us in for a couple massage. When they ever led us to the same room we nearly died. Thankfully it was the 2 of us so we just laughed it off and went with it. Once we were lying in our beds you just forget the other one is in the other bed and relax. You are surrounded by the smell of cocoa and it was probably the most decadent massage you could get. Everything was going great until I was told to roll over. This is when I realized they weren't using cocoa butter; we were actually being covered / massaged with hot melted chocolate! Lisa said when she rolled over and saw this she had to force herself not to laugh and all she could think was, "Katy has no idea this is happening"!
Then we were both having the same thought: thank God we came from the pool so Lisa has her camera in the changing room because no one is going to believe this!
Lisa asked them not to massage her face where as I said do what you will. When the masseuses left the room we were crying laughing at each other. This is why:
Lisa went in the shower first and was laughing because chocolate was spraying everywhere. I was at the sink trying to at least start getting my face cleaned but I had chocolate just dropping off me. Even showering didn't help....I still found chocolate on me later. By far the funniest thing to happen yet on this trip.
After we headed back to the room to tell Muma and Jen of our odd adventure, got changed and headed to dinner.
Lisa finally got to put something in the recycle bins
At dinner, Lisa ordered a cosmopolitan and got this drink - first time she ever got a Cosmo with a straw
After dinner it was off to bed (still smelling like chocolate). Tomorrow we check out and head to the beach resort (with a stop at the mud baths along the way). Here are our final towel animals:
Muma and Lisa got a dog
Jen and I got swans
I'm kind of sad we won't have animals in our rooms anymore.
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