Santa Elena Cloud Forest

Our naturalist guide, Carlos, loves his job. He could hardly wait to get us in the van to drive to the hotel next to ours where a troop of white-faced, capuchin monkeys were playing and eating.  It was so much fun watching their antics and they have such cute faces!

It was a short ride to the Santa Elena Reserve which is owned by the Santa Elena school district.  It is about 5000 acres and is worked by the students as they study the bio-diverse cloud forest. Carlos was very good at spotting birds and then getting them in his spotting scope and taking pictures through the scope with our cameras. One of the first birds was a hawk.   

This forest was rich with trees covered from base to tree top with 20-30 different plants like philodendron, ferns, orchid, and many kinds of succulents.  Some trees will survive this way, others die inside of all that cover and others are toppled by the wind due to the heavy weight it carries.

This reserve is on the east or Caribbean side of the mountains so it gets lots of rain and cloud cover while forests on the Pacific side are drier and less dense. 

While the guys watched football or read by the pool, Susanna and I took in the Coffee, Chocolat and Sugar cane tour.  We picked the coffee berries, saw how the beans were removed from the pulp, dried, seperated from their papery cover and then roasted.  We rode in the oxcart which was used at one time to transport the coffee to market.  We then did the same this with the cocoa bean, learning how to open the cocoa pod, seperate out the beans, fermentment them before drying and crushing them.  Mixed with pepper, vanilla, or brown sugar and then trying the resutant concoction was the highlight of the tour.  We also tried fresh squeezed sugar cane.