Waterfalls in the Cloud Forest

11/28/2012: Susan: On Wednesday morning we got ready early and hurried off after breakfast to catch the 8:15 bus to San Miguel to spend the day in the cloud forest. I had asked Meghan the night before to write out a cheat sheet for me so that I could ask the bus driver to let us know when we came to the cemetery outside of San Miguel, where our tour guide was to pick us up. I handed the note to the bus driver, and he said something to me in Spanish, shaking his head. I could understand enough to catch that this bus didn’t GO to San Miguel, but couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. We asked if anyone spoke English, and one passenger spoke a tiny bit and tried to help us. The best I could get was that we would have to take another bus. I had no idea where we were supposed to get off to get this other bus, so the ride was a bit nerve-wracking to say the least!

The bus driver took us as far as his route went, and let us off at his turn-around, pretty much in the middle of nowhere! Why he didn’t drop us at a bus stop in the town we had just driven through, I’ll never know. Perhaps he thought he was doing us a favor to get us as close as possible to our destination. But we had no idea how far it was to the next bus stop, and had no choice but to walk for about 1 to 2 kilometers along a very narrow busy road with no shoulder or sidewalk, and tractor trailers whizzing by us. Not fun! We finally came to a bus stop, where a young boy in his school uniform was waiting. We tried to talk with him, but alas, he spoke no English. Eventually the bus came along (the 8:45 bus DOES go all the way to San Miguel), and we were able to get to our destination. 

José Miranda met us at the bus stop, along with a young woman named Heylin, who was to serve as our translator, since José speaks very little English. José owns a large dairy farm and a piece of tropical cloud forest, which he is preserving and expanding. He and his wife and daughter operate a bed and breakfast called Albergue el Socorro, and provide tours of their beautiful piece of the cloud forest. The road to the farm was windy and rough, as we bounced about in the back of his very old Jeep. He pulled over to point out howler monkeys, and to allow us to admire the rushing San Fernando river. 
When we finally arrived at his property, he led us across the pasture into his cloud forest paradise. It started to rain (of course!), but as always, we had our umbrellas and rubber boots. We travelled through a section of lush primary cloud forest, and then entered a section of secondary growth, which had been cattle pasture just 12 years earlier. It was amazing to see how fast the forest returns! We hope that support for his eco-tourism business allows him to return more pasture to forest. 

We walked at a fairly brisk clip because José was anxious to show us a waterfall before lunchtime, but we did have time to stop and admire several orchids. 

The mud was slick, and more than once, our young translator slid and almost fell. I did a nice slide as well, and landed on my thigh in the mud. But we made it down finally to arrive at the beautiful river with huge boulders and a low waterfall.

Dan was particularly impressed by a large six-sided boulder that José showed him. The hexagonal shape of this rock indicates that it was formed when magma cooled very slowly in the throat of a volcano without reaching the surface. This type of rock is known as a laccolith.

As we started back up the steep hill in this deep river valley, José’s cell phone rang. It seemed impossible to us that he could receive a call in a place that seemed so incredibly remote!

When we emerged from the forest to his open pasture land, we were amazed at how soft and spongy the grass-covered ground felt. We could virtually bounce up and down on this springy ground. As we walked along the country road, we stopped to admire a beautiful tall waterfall far in the distance, just visible through a gap in the trees.

We finished our two hour hike at an open-air dining pavilion, and enjoyed a wonderful lunch of locally raised tilapia, the ever present gallo pinto (rice and beans), and fabulous fresh fruit juice. While we ate, we watched numerous colorful birds, including the scarlet-rumped tanager, come to the feeding platforms where José placed fresh fruit for the birds’ lunch.

After lunch, José showed us his methane capturing system. The manure from the dairy cows is moved to a large plastic holding “bag” and the methane it gives off is captured and transferred to the kitchen, where it is used as cooking gas for the stove. Ingenious, economical and great for the environment. Why don’t we do more of that in the U.S.??

Then we climbed back into the Jeep, and bounced down the road and through several gates. We ended up in a pasture, where we disembarked and followed José into another piece of forest. 

He led us down a VERY steep and slick hill, and Heylin and I gratefully accepted the bamboo walking sticks he had brought for us. I was impressed by the incredible diversity of ferns in the cloud forest: there were ferns of all types everywhere, from low-growing ferns on the forest floor, to epiphytic ferns in the trees, to large tree ferns. By contrast, in the lowland tropical forest, I saw far fewer ferns and more palms and aroids.

Although the footing was a bit treacherous, it was well worth the effort. We came to a viewpoint that looked over a deep canyon across to the very tall waterfall we had seen in the distance before lunch. 

It was a spectacular view, and one that probably few people get to enjoy, given that we were on José’s private property, looking across to the waterfall on adjacent private property. Heylin had never seen the waterfall, even though she grew up in the town at the bottom of the mountain we were on. It was astonishing to Dan that a waterfall of that significant size would not be a major tourist attraction. It is a testament to how much natural beauty lays hidden in Costa Rica. Anywhere else in the world, there would have been a large parking lot and a cement viewing platform and hundreds of tourists.

 

When we returned to the pasture, we found a couple milking the cows next to our parked Jeep. Rather than herd the cows to a barn to be milked, this couple traveled to the cows, along with their pack horse that carried that milk jugs. We smiled and waved at them, and climbed back into the ancient Jeep for the drive back down the mountain to San Miguel. The sun actually broke through for a while, and the views were spectacular. It was a wonderful day in the cloud forest, and we had no problems with the bus ride back to Chilamate, arriving back just as it was getting dark.