Costa Rica: Bijagua

To leave Cano Negro, we had a  38km drive on gravel road to the main highway then we headed north through Upala, 3 km from Nicaragua and continued to Bijagau, located in the valley between two volcanos.

Our host is Leda at Paz Entres Volcanes, another AirBnB.  

She speaks no English, but it appears that my Spanish is working ok.  We’ve even had a few conversations.  And we seem to be participating in the same one at the same time!  

We took advantage of the clear skies to go explore the local area and pick up a few provisions.  We found the Helicones Rainforest Lodge at the top of a road, overlooking the valley with a view to Lake Arenal in the distance.

Unbeknown to us, this is a very popular birding area and the main attraction is several sky bridges.  

We were standing and admiring the view and flowers when a young man, 14 or so, showed up, from one of the trails, with birding gear, binocs and camera. He is the son of the property owner, and lives here.  After striking up a conversation and him pointing out several birds for Tom, we agreed to meet him in the morning for birding together. It was too late to go this afternoon as they were getting ready to close.  In hindsight we should have gone for a walk with him right then!

We headed back to our B& B and were greeted by a group of howler monkeys- right in our yard! And they gave us a 5am wake up call from outside our bedroom window!

I did a night walk around the yard and found a few fun things.

The view just before the torrential rains began

So, here we are at the lodge.  We were here at 8am for our walk with Abner, the young man. However, it looks as if this will be a down day due to the weather.  The clouds are surrounding the mountain, we can hear thunder and the rain just keeps coming down harder and harder.   

This very cool 5" 'leaf like mantis was on the inside avoiding the rain also!

And four hours later, it’s still raining really hard!  Evidently the tropical low-pressure system is somewhat stalled over Costa Rica at the moment. The winds are increasing, as is the rain.  Even the folks that work here seem to be quite amazed at the amount coming down… we’re taking advantage of the unplanned down day to process photos and write.

A not very happy tom catalogs birds while waiting for the rain to stop.  Can't waste a wasted day.

We finally gave up  about 3 and headed back down the mountain.  About 200 feet down, the rain stopped.  It rained, lightly, on and off for the rest of the afternoon and evening. We decided to go out for pizza and go to bed early. Tomorrow we head south to Caracoles.