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Jay & Nicole's Trip to Costa Rica - May 2007 (click any small picture to get enlargement) |
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This
is the last
page documenting Nicole & Jay's trip to Costa Rica. |
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| We awoke to a less cloudy sky and could finally see where the volcano was located. There were trees and bushes up to a certain height, after that it was just covered with lava stone ... quite barren! | ||
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| We
decided that we should visit a butterfly farm, as we haven't had much luck
seeing any insects on our own.
There were many 'insect farms'. Some places were like parks and staffed by volunteers. This place was run by biologists, who sold 'living products' to make a living. |
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| We
walked through the different enclosures, each having different species of
butterflies to look at.
They put out some fruit and it was interesting to watch the butterflies come to lunch, just like a household pet. They eat by sucking the juice through their long, tubular tongue. |
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| The
butterflies didn't want to sit still, so I had many bad pictures.
The most beautiful specimen
was a gigantic moth, which had wings of bright blue on the inside and tiger
eyes on the outside.
There was also a very strange species that had transparent wings, as pictured below. |
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| Butterfly farming is more complicated than we ever thought. To attract specific butterflies, the owners plant trees, shrubs and flowers that the insects like ... then they let Mother Nature take over. | ||
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| The butterflies come and lay eggs, which hatch into caterpillars that eat the vegetation. After a period of time they form cocoons, which the owners search for and cover for protection. | ||
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At
a specific point, the cocoons are harvested, incubated, packaged and sold to
universities or zoos; I never knew there was a market for such things!
The caterpillar to the right shows what is inside each of the cocoons ... until it "morph's" into a butterfly or moth. |
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| Some frogs are also bred and the tadpoles are sold. The frog above was beautiful and was big; about the size of our hand! | This pretty frog is endangered, poisonous and thus enclosed! | |
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| The squirrels and monkeys take advantage of the 'free food' ... to the dismay of the farmers. | ||
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 We were nearing the end of our trip and we absorbed as many rain forest views as we could. |
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| We drove around the volcano and found more bad roads. | An interesting way to 'take the horses out for a walk'! | The clouds were clearing up from around the volcano. |
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| We drove closer to the volcano, and got the clearest view so far, but we couldn't get any closer. | ||
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As we drove out of the area, we got different perspectives of a grand volcano. |
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We left the Arenal volcano area and traveled back towards San Jose on small internal highways. Our goal was to visit Poas Volcano, which was along the way. It is a semi-active volcano that is supposed to have a nice visitor's center, which will come in handy if the weather is bad. We passed flat, open plains that were mainly used for agriculture and cattle grazing. Costa Rica has small amounts of land which can be cultivated, so farmland is important and most people live in the foothills. |
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| The weather got pretty bad, with dark clouds and periodic rain ... which didn't make for good pics! | ||
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| We could not tell what kind of products were being grown since they were covered with plastic. | ||
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We started to climb into the mountains when we came across a nice waterfall ... we decided to take a short break since it had stopped raining. |
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| The falls continued further beyond sight, as the valley walls were quite steep. If we had more time, we could have taken a quick dip in the alluring pool; a hike would have been too difficult though. | ||
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| We made it to the Poas Volcano area as it began to rain. We toured the visitor center and the rain quit so we made the 20 minute walk to the crater. The path went along the rim and dropped off steeply, from nice greenery to rocky desolation. | ||
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| Our
view of the crater was partially blocked by a drizzly fog.
We opened up a bottle of wine and toasted to the wind god ... hoping that the clouds would be blown away. The fog then began to
lift ... |
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 The crater 'burped' as we moved to a different vantage point. |
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| The view was quite nice ... actually the best volcanic crater that either of us had even seen! | ||
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| The different colored minerals, mainly sulphur and iron, made quite a colorful scene. | ||
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We met most of our touring objectives, but we did miss out on seeing the Caribbean coast ... ... we will save that for next time! |
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We enjoyed our visit and will keep Central America high on our list of places to visit again in the future.
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