Plants on the floor of the cloud forest
Todays tours at the Selvatura tourist park included the walkways with eight suspension bridges through the forest canopy, a butterfy garden which was indoors, and a hummingbird garden. The walkway was about 3 km long, they said in the office it would take about an hour and a half, but we went very slowly, taking lots of pictures, and it took us nearly three. We saw a few new species of birds and an agouti right at the start of the trail, but no other animals, though some other people we met on the trail had seen monkeys. One of the most interesting parts of the walk was on the bridges, for you were up at the tops of the canopy and could see the flowers and fruits that grow on top of the trees.
Owl butterfy
After lunch, which we ate in a small flower garden outside the restaurant, we went on a guided tour of the butterfly garden. They ony had about half a dozen kinds of butterflys, but they were very colorful. The guide gave a very good explanation of how they raise the butterflies. I was surprised at how ignorant some of the people on the tour were about some simple biology. One woman seemed appalled that the butterflies would die in about three weeks at the end of their normal life cycle. They do harvest the larvae and move them to a location on the Carribean so that they don’t eat all the plants in the greenhouse, then bring them back in the chrysallis stage to metamorphize into adults.
We stayed in the greenhouse at the end of the guided tour for a while to take more pictures. It is almost impossible to get pictures of the Blue Morpho as they do not settle on the plants but seem to spend all their time in flight.
Hummingbird at feeder
After that we went to the hummingbird garden. We have never seen so many hummingbirds at one time. They had feeders there, and they were constantly in use. The hummingbirds dart in and out to the feeders and fly right by very close. They listed seven different species on the sign there, and we saw at least five of them. They are beautifully colored with their iradescent feathers. The largest of them were about five inches long, and deep violet. The
smallest were only two inches and beautiful green with a white stripe on their backs.
When we got back to our hostel I went to the bank to try and get money from the ATM. It refused, saying “insufficient funds”.. I then tried in the bank but the teller would not even try my card since my name is not imprinted on it. I then went to another bank, with exactly the same response on the ATM. By now I was really starting to worry that someone had cleaned out our account, so I went back to the hostel to get Enid, thinking that perhaps her card would work. We tried both our Visa cards as well, with no more luck. We tried to phone long distance to the number on the bank card but that wouldn’t go through. We talked to one of the young Canadian men and asked if he knew how to make a long distance call to Canada, and he suggested that we use Skype. Thank goodness for his idea, it worked, we called the 1-800 number in Canada and got the problem solved.
We had a nice meal in Morpho Restaurant, came back and got most of our stuff packed. We’re just waiting for the kitchen to clear out a bit so we can make our lunch for tomorrow.