Wandergliding: Climbing a Crazy Tree & Hiking in a Cloudforest

February 4^th, 2015

The previous evening Taylor and I went to a restaurant bar appropriately called the Treehouse, as there was a massive tree growing up through the upstairs outside area. Some live music was playing and we ran into Lauren and Jessica, a couple of young Alaskan operating nurses whom we’d met in La Fortuna so we sat down with them. Unfortunately the music only lasted about half an hour more as the three guitarists were pretty decent. The main man, the acoustic guitarist and singer, sat down with us afterwards and he was an American who was teaching music in the local school as part of his degree. He told of us an incredible tree in town that was super fun to climb and very tall. There is a type of tree in this area commonly known as “stranglers”. A strangler slowly envelopes another tree in probably one of the slowest murders on this earth. Eventually the victim tree dies and rots away leaving the strangler as a hollowed out tree. Lauren took down some instructions on how to find this tree and we made a plan to go there in the morning.

The instructions proved to be quite accurate and we only had to ask some local electrical workers on the side of the road for the final piece of the puzzle to locate the tree. Wow, what a find! It angled up at a 70 degree angle with an easy entrance into its core tunnel which looked to be some 70 feet long with easy hand and foot holds all the way up. I was the first to climb up but the rest, Taylor, Lauren, Jessica and Doug, a young bridge inspecting engineer from New York, soon joined me. Exiting the top of the tunnel was a bit unnerving at first but we found that four of us could fit where the major branches, umm, branched out. We could even see the Pacific Ocean from our vantage point. What an awesome find!

THE tree:

The tunnel inside:

Looking down from the top, yes, those are people down there:

Looking out to the ocean:

There it is:

At the top:

Doug popping out:

But Doug didn't want to come all the way up, so Lauren had to squeeze by him...nice play Doug ;)

Lauren and Taylor chillin' 70 feet up:

Trying a selfie of everyone:

Doug did a better job with his camera:

Lauren's farewell:

My summation:

The Alaskan ladies poking out:

In the tunnel:

Taylor, Lauren and Jessica descending:

In the afternoon Taylor and I went for a hike in the Santa Elena Cloud Forest and it did live up to its name as it was sunny in Monteverde but overcast and a bit foggy in the park. That reminds me, there are even signs in town for “Las Nubes”, or “The Clouds”, 9 kilometres away in a certain direction…and it seemed to be right! The forest was super lush in vegetation but we didn’t see any wildlife except for some birds, which wasn’t surprising since it was the middle of the afternoon. Nonetheless it was a nice hike.

In the cloud forest: