Alison does Costa Rica

Riding from Santa Elena to Monteverde

Also went to see a live volcano (fiery lava rocks spewing over side) and the hot sulfer springs last night which are apparently restorative. (I feel Zen-like today)

The headline means ¨the viewing of the snake¨or ¨the sight of the snake¨or some other awkward Spanish phrase that I likely don´t have quite right. Yes, I had my first sighting. It was lying in the path during my tour of a rainforest.
Fortunately, the snake was miniature ... like maybe circumference of a half an inch and length of about a foot. I was surprised to find that I did not have a panic attack but remained calm and collected. Perhaps because it just looked like a giant worm.
I did a canopy zipline tour of the jungle today which was very fun, and included a 3 story free fall (I screamed very loud)

Guess who got up on a surfboard multiple times the other day? (note: the waves were miniature) (note: much of the hard work paddling out was done by instructor Diego, who kept trying to convince me to come to Ladies Night at the local bar to "practice my Spanish")
Now I am in the depths of a rainforest where it has been pounding rain on the tin roof all evening. I´m getting into backpacker mentality and cooking in the hostel to save like $1 a meal. My days of $13 cocktails in trendy NYC bars seem like forever ago...

You know how I'm obsessed with white noise & sound machines? Well, last night I fell asleep to a real pounding rainforest rain that sounded exactly like my sound machine (complete with tropical birds chirping in the background). So I felt like I was at home in NYC. Tonight the hostel kids are being loud & making me feel like an old 30 year old. I'm off to bed shortly as I had a BIG day in the jungle with some random friends I made from the US & AU. Oh. side note. As I type there is a lizard on the wall just one foot away. So, in the jungle we saw monkeys and sloths, and bushwacked our way through the jungle & forded two streams to see a waterfall (imagine me, bushwhacking! OK, slight exagerration)
No snake sightings yet!

Costa Rica, a country merely the size of West Virginia, contains 8% of the world's snakes. I will soon be there for 6 weeks and have a massive snake phobia. I currently live in NYC where the chance of encountering a snake is fairly slim. (exception: my friend's sister in the Upper West Side found a black snake in her bathtub; apparently a neighbor's escaped pet)
CR is home to some of the world's deadliest poisonous snakes: Bushmasters, boa constrictors, coral snakes, fer-de-lances. I am convinced I will be one of the 800 people who gets bitten yearly in CR, so have studied up on what to do in case of a bite. Luckily, only 10 die and I think my odds are better than that