Today’s activities were a shared tour to the Arenal Hanging Bridges. This was a private park with a loop walk approximately 3.4 Km through tropical rainforest, navigating various hanging suspension bridges set at various heights and of varying length.  There were 15 of us, all collected en route from our hotels. It started off dry, but needless to say, pelted down for a good proportion of our 2 hour walk.

We saw or had pointed out to us bats, a sloth, owls, birds, and monkeys in the high canopy. We saw a hummingbird nest with chicks in it. The forest was very luscious and wet!

It was an interesting walk, but I think I was expecting to see more wildlife. Our guide was very informative, armed with a very fancy telescope on tripod to make sure we could all see something. Sometimes it was hard to appreciate that the black blob was a tiny bat!

This is the Josh tree, looking right up at it. Looks like a set of lungs – those in the know will see what I mean!

We returned to our hotel for an hour before being picked up for the afternoon’s chocolate trip and visit to the La Fortuna 65m waterfall. Interesting learning about the history and processes involved in chocolate, with a practical demo from bean to runny – yummy chocolate!

We then headed to the waterfall, negotiating 500 steps down to the pool, and 500 back up!

It was certainly noisy and  powerful, but not nearly as impressive as some I’ve seen.

Finally, we headed back to the hotel, hot, sweaty and wet!.

Following a relaxing evening, lovely refreshing sleep, time to pack up and move on to Monteverde Cloud Forest region. The Nayara Springs hotel is in a lovely setting, impressive villa room, friendly and helpful staff, but slightly disappointing restaurant  dining – but we only went to one for meals both nights.  In spite of very strict instructions that my steak needed to be well done, ‘no pink, no blood’!  It was very definitely  underdone.  Without hesitation, we were not charged for it.

However,Nayara Springs  was expensive and I would probably stay somewhere less exotic and spend more time exploring the area if I was into rafting and zip lining!

For us, the luxury was appreciated. We were delighted (f that is the right word!) to settle up our bill using the Halifax Clarity MasterCard,  given that we opted to pay in US Dollars, we benefitted from no foreign exchange fees and the recent surge in value offering around $1.40 to GBP.