Costa Rica! # 7 - Carara National Park/UFC

I love how calm our lives have been this past couple of weeks. It's so nice to just sit there at night, watching the sun set, listening to the waves crash. I could really get used to this. :)

Here is a little video of the lightning last night. It lit up the whole sky!

This morning we drove over to Carara National Park, about 20 minutes away. We got there nice and early since we'd heard animal sightings are better in the morning. I've come to love all of these brown signs with yellow writing - maybe because they usually mean something fun is happening, or because I love reading everything in Spanish, or maybe they just look cool. Yeah, probably that last one.

A lot of garage doors look like this in Costa Rica - it's my favorite!

After leaving our car in Carlos' good hands (there's a guy in the parking lot with a sign that says, "Carlos will watch your car. If somebody break your window, you will be sad."), we started off on a hike to a lagoon.

It must have rained last night because the trail was muddy, and there were all these little trenches with water in them.

It's hard to spot it in the picture, but Lance is looking at this little inch worm type of bug - we watched him shimmying up his little string for a bit. So cool!

Get ready for another load of mushroom pictures...

Little umbrellas!

This one looked like coral!

These looked like rubbery orange potato chips!

I'm pretty sure these aren't mushrooms...they looked like yogurt-dipped pretzels. It's a mystery.

We saw sooo many lizards and iguanas on this hike! Don't worry - I'll only post a few pictures. :) This guy was eating those little orange nut/berry/? thingies. Cool to watch him eat!

Most of the trail was fine, but some of it was pure mud.

Squish, squish...

First monkey sighting of the day! There were a couple of them.

This was one of those 10-times-bigger-than-all-the-other-trees-around-it trees - I love those!

This was such a fun critter sighting - we had no clue what it was! It kind of looked like a wallaby, scurried kind of like a rabbit, was the size of a huge cat, had rat-like features...we were stumped.

This is a better picture of it from Google - turns out it's an agouti. Never heard of it.

There were a few little spots along the hike where you could see the water. We stopped here for a bit to listen to the birds (parrots maybe? huge and red?) screeching at each other. Almost as scary as the howler monkeys!

Video of the birds (sound only).

This was a new kind of lizard for us - not sure what kind.

Yes...this is what you think it is. I'll spare you the video. :)

Slinking off after the deed was done.

Monster tree.

Just wanted to remember our nice little trail buddies who shared their bug spray with me and made the rest of my hike much more enjoyable. :)

Another monkey sighting; this one wasn't a howler monkey - not sure what it was though.

Another agouti! They were so fun to watch! Super out of place though - they just looked odd among all the other jungle critters.

Finally got a picture of one of those Jesus Christ Lizards (named for their ability to walk on water)! A terrible picture, but I'll take it! He scurried off towards the water, but we lost him before seeing him perform.

See the bright green lizard on the branch? He was a new species for us too.

This one looked and moved like a frog. Another new one.

Something in the water was making this log move. All we could see was tadpoles.

We came across another news species - in fact, we didn't even know what type of bug it was. I couldn't get the camera to focus on the web or the spider, but that yellow blob is what Google later revealed to be:

a Spiny Backed Orb Weaver. Can you believe how nuts that is?!

I was taking a picture of how these vines/leaves affix themselves to trees...

and Lance spotted this cool bug on the tree. See that huge stinger-looking thing coming off the end of him? So interesting!

I love those bright green speckles on this one!

There were a lot of gigantic banana trees on this hike.

I'm not sure I've ever actually seen bananas on a banana tree before.

There's this interesting flower thingy at the end of each banana bunch.

Its bright red leaves were scattered all over the place on our hike - such a fun bit of color.

The picture doesn't really capture it, but this one had bright turquoise little spikies.

The first half of the hike the bugs were driving us crazy! I got bit probably 20 times. Also, I kept feeling little creepy crawlies on the back of my neck, but couldn't quite tell what they were after smashing them. Lance kept brushing them off my neck, until finally he noticed that the back of my hat was full of them! They'd been crawling down from the hat into my hair and onto my neck - ewwww! He grabbed my hat and got rid of all the ones there, while I was frantically trying to comb them out of my hair. Anyway, we couldn't figure out what they were - they looked like baby maggots...albino baby ants...something like that. Later we came across this larvae on a big leaf...and I'm pretty sure that's what was on the back of my neck.

Luckily we weren't bothered any more after we got some bug spray!

We were so exhausted after hiking all morning, so we stopped at Jaco Taco on the way home and split a meal. Their tacos are monstrous! And sooooo good!

After resting for a couple of hours, we went to the UFC at a bar in town. That first picture is before anybody else got there. We got the best seat in the house! We'd had to pay $20 per person to reserve a table, but that $40 could all go towards food. We started with a smoothie. It was so huge!

It didn't look that big in the last picture, so I made Lance take a picture of me and my tiny hands holding it - my fingers couldn't even quite touch!

Mike Swick knocking out DaMarques Johnson. Such a good fight! Machida beat Ryan Bader (meh, as Machida usually is), Shogun beat Brandon Vera (epic battle), Joe Lauzon beat Jamie Varner. Good night of fights! Such a fun time! And we have lots of leftovers for tomorrow.

Filet Mignon Rendang Curry. I thought bars were supposed to have terrible food! It was all delicious!

Sliders - bacon/bleu cheese, mushroom Swiss, and pepperjack jalapeno. Yum!

We somehow managed to squeeze in some dessert. Yum!

I had to take a picture of the funny bathroom sign. :)

On the way home, after stopping at a pharmacy for some $13 bug spray (ouch!), we stopped to check out the casino by our house. It was super tiny and there were maybe 2 people there. We figured it would be packed on a Saturday night. We'd just come to take a peak, but the guy at the door seemed kind of offended when we left after 60 seconds. Oops!