Guest Post from Costa Rica

The following entry is courtesy of Dan Glickman who comments on our recent trip to La Fortuna and Monteverde, Costa Rica.

The highlight of our trip to Costa Rica was Arenal volcano. I guess I expected to see a dormant volcano in the distance. Instead, it was really active, larger than I expected, and frankly the approach to the volcano as seen from a pleasureful boat across a serene lake was probably the best moment. Plus we didn't just see a mountain; it was a real volcano with glowing lava flows, rumbling hydro-magmatic eruptions, and truck-sized boulders.

Beyond the volcano, we really had a great time hiking to a pretty waterfall, exploring the cloud forest, seeing wildlife, and risking life and limb on a zip-line and on a short flight on a Cessna. There was a lot of adventure but there was also creature comforts like great food, particularly from a place called Chimera in Monteverde. We saw a toucan, a howler monkey, a 2-toes sloth, an unnervingly large tarantula, a great big bird called a guan, a crocodile, and strangler trees. The downsides were not seeing the setting of Jurassic Park, Isla del Cocos, which I really now want to visit and that Zia was sometimes too tense. All in all, it was a reminder of the power of evolution and that we are just specks in the continuum of life on this planet.