My day of rest yesterday was marvelous. I had an enormous breakfast and then read in the lounge of my hotel for hours. When I got tired of reading, I decided to visit the local orchid garden. After selling me my ticket, the guy behind the counter announced that he would be my tour guide. I was hesitant at first, thinking that having a guide to show me flowers would be silly and unnecessary, but immediately recanted when I realized that many of the orchids were smaller than a pea. Had it not been for the guide, I would have most likely gotten the the end of the entire garden without seeing a single flower. The guide also offered to let me borrow his motorcycle for a few hours (talk about a SERIOUS lack of judgment), but I declined.
To counteract the beauty of the orchid garden, I headed to the Mundo de los Insectos to see all things disgusting and horrible. The tour guide immediately handed me a large walking stick (a bug, not a cane) and then took it back and stuck it on my face for a photo. However, that was not nearly as disturbing as when he handed me a huge, furry orange-kneed tarantula. He kept enthusiastically saying, ¨I have a surprise for you!¨, which concerned me deeply because there is no surprise that I could possibly want from a zoo of large bugs.
After the two tours, I grocery shopped and cooked pasta with tomato sauce in the hotel of my kitchen for dinner. The remainder of the evening was spent relaxing on the porch of the hotel with a large group of locals who, among other topics of discussion, kindly explained that my calling the cloud forest a rainforest was an egregious error.
At 6:15am this morning, I dragged my drowsy butt out of bed and back into dirty clothes for a hike through the rainforest cloud forest. Using a map of the Santa Elena Reserve, I selected a trail that covered 8.2km of gorgeous mossy forest. The hike was peaceful and enjoyable, but the wildlife was minimal – I saw a few butterflies, a horribly ugly caterpillar, and a few tiny birds. After all of that walking, the most interesting creature I saw was a large, black, chicken-like bird that was in a tree 500m from the parking lot.
Time for lunch.
Just to clarify: that declaration was in no way related to my sighting of the chicken-like bird. I am not the type to bring a fork into the rainforest in hopes of spearing a toucan for lunch.