We were a little banged up from canyoning, and there was the World Cup final, so we decided to postpone our hike through the cloud forest until the next day. We checked out the Herpetarium, which houses probably 30 species of snakes, as well as frogs, toads, lizards, turtles, and tarantulas, all native to Costa Rica. A lot of the slithery residents are nocturnal, so the snake house stays open at night and you can reuse your ticket to come back when they wake up. More on this later.
Chelsea made a friend in Monteverde. Our first night in, we stopped at a taco stand called Taco Taco and Chelsea ordered our food in decent Spanish. The woman taking orders/making food was totally charmed by her. We ended up going to Taco Taco every day, and whenever she'd see Chelsea she'd say,
Oooooh, mi amor!!
And giggle. It was darling.
So after some yummy Taco Taco, we went to watch the game. There's only one bar in Monteverde (that we're aware of) and just about everyone was there. We sat at a table with Swedes and Canadians, next to ROARING Germans that kept singing the national anthem (which, for the record, should have been changed after WW2 because some of us have seen Holocaust-era stock footage and yes, it's the same song. May I add a hearty cringe?).
Aaaanyway, I think we just crashed early that night. I attempted to find a strangler fig - Hm. Let's do an explanatory tangent.
Strangler figs are members of the ficus family. They're parasites. They attach to the tops of trees and their roots grow down, down, down, around the trunk of the host tree, and the strangler embeds itself and sucks the nutrients out, eventually killing the host. Then, the original tree rots away, leaving eerie structures that look like enormous Chinese finger traps. Remember me talking about the trees that look like lattice? Strangler fig.
Anyway, there's a really really big and well-known ficus in Monteverde that you can climb. It's pretty hard to find and not owned by anyone, so you just do it on your own. I got directions from a lady at the hostel, but it was getting dark by the time found the hill after the bank around the corner from the blue house after turning left up the sharpest of three hills (...), so I postponed.
When I got back, the hostel's resident muralist/visual artist started asking me about my ankle tattoo. He said he had worked as a tattoo artist and was just starting to get back into it.
Jesse, our friend from canyoning, had gotten an Allan tattoo. I've been loosely wanting a scarab beetle, but since tattoos are a zillion billion dollars, I figured I wouldn't get it. But I like supporting nice people and this is an artist without a studio, so I'd rather give him my money than someone that doesn't need it. Was my logic at the time. So I told him I'd been wanting a tattoo and he said to think about it and get back to him.
Then, sleep.
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