Chasing the butterfly. . .

No, this isn't a counter-culture reference to opium use. It's actually about a butterfly. One night, while getting ready for bed, a good-sized winged creature swooped down and started flapping madly about the place. At first I thought it was a bat, as we have quite a few of those around here. It turned out to be a good-sized butterfly that had flown into the place at some point. Not wanting to mash the creature, I chased it around, turning off lights in different rooms and closing doors to keep it somewhat penned in. I used my baseball hat to try to herd it, but these buggers are surprisingly quick and agile. Finally, after about 15 to 20 minutes of chasing it around, I trapped it inside my hat with a towel on top to keep it there. I made my way to the door, opened it up and took the towel off of the hat. The butterfly flew out, and stuck to my shirt like glue. It could have saved me a lot of hassle and chase if it had done that way back when. Took a bit to get it off of my shirt, but it finally vamoosed into the night.
The next morning, Lucy found it perched outside on one of the pillars and snapped this picture of it. It stood there for a while before deciding to fly away.

Zip-itty doo-dah. . .

Recently, we had a break where there were no check-ins or check-outs, so we took advantage of the free time -- purely a business trip, of course -- to check out a new canopy tour, or zipline, in the San Lorenzo Cloud Forest for future guests here. . . And when I say cloud forest, it is in the clouds. It's amazing to be soaring through the clouds at a good clip. . . The company is called San Luis Canopy Tour, and is on the road between here and San Ramon. . . A very nice place with 12 lines. . . For those who haven't zipped before, you wear a harness and are hooked onto a line that goes between trees and you can get going pretty fast. . .You have on gloves, and your dominant hand has padding on the glove, as you press down with that to slow yourself down . . . We've done it before, and this one was really fun. . . You start out with a couple of short lines and you're a few hundred feet off the ground at some points, going over and through the trees, with a river and waterfalls visible way below you. . . The last line is 550 meters long (about 1,800 feet, I believe) and ends up right at the restaurant of the tour. Our guides were great, funny and informative. . . There's also a Tarzan Swing, where you hook in to a line and go flying straight out and then back several times. . . The Tarzan Swing was a first for us, and we really enjoyed it. . . Here's a picture I took of Mark swinging through the jungle...I would put in a picture of myself on the Tarzan Swing, but Mark took the picture and got a really nice shot of my hand only, he forgot the rest of me...we didn't sound much like Tarzan when we were swinging, but since this is a family-friendly blog, we won't print what was said while flying through the clouds. . .

Hungry Butterfly

Just outside of our house we have several tree stumps where we place food for the birds to come eat throughout the day...typically we will put out different fruits for the birds to come and enjoy...we had this butterfly perched on the stump for a few hours just hanging out and grinding (eating), until mark came along and scared him off...i'm not quite sure what the name of this type of butterfly is...i looked through my costa rica wildlife guide book and couldn't find him...but it was nice just watching him sit there and eat...i know the banana looks kind of nasty that he's eating, but, hey, to him i'm sure it's just delicious...for some reason the butterflies prefer spoiled or rotten fruit, they can't seem to get enough of the stuff. . . a lot of the birds prefer the fruit to be more on the ripe side as well.

Gauguin of the jungle. . .

OK. . . Maybe the style doesn't fit, but it has a better ring to it than Warhol or DaVinci of the Jungle, you have to admit. . . Kenneth (the younger fellow) works here at Tree Houses four days per week, and is a student during the rest of the time. He's also a pretty darn good artist. When we needed a new sign to point the way to the waterfall and pools, he came up with the design and painted it on a piece of wood.

With Kenneth is Miguel (who can build pretty much anything from wood just using a hand saw and a machete) and the Tree Houses pooch, Bejuca. Two weeks ago, Miguel was cutting brush at the neighbor's place, and heard a branch fall. He turned around, and about 50 meters away was a jaguar. He said that he stayed still and maintained eye contact with the feline for about five minutes. The jaguar came to within 15 to 20 meters of Miguel before getting a whiff of him, and then took off like a shot. If you ever come across a jaguar in the jungles of Costa Rica, you should remain still and calm and keep eye contact, just like Miguel. Personally, I probably would have set a record of some sorts for fastest short-distance sprint while screaming and wailing.

Volcano view. . .

This is the view you get from the restaurant, right down the road from Tree Houses. The restaurant is called Lomas Del Mapache, and the food is very good. If they don't have the karaoke going or the jukebox blaring, it's a very nice place to hang out. It's an open-air restaurant with an unobstructed view of the volcano, which is 30 or so kilometers away by car. From this side of the volcano, the lava isn't visible, but if you drive around to the other side -- and the weather cooperates (never a given) -- then you can see lava and rocks tumbling down. See the picture below. Back to Mapache. They have bacon-wrapped shrimp stuffed with cheese that is truly outstanding, though a given to take a few years off of your life. . . The chicken gordon blue (yes, that's how it's spelled--maybe it's a Costa Rican spin) is also very good. When the sun is setting, even if the top of the volcano isn't visible and there are clouds around, it makes for a spectacular sunset.

X marks the spot. . .

Yesterday, we went back to flip the switch on the water tank for the hotel (yes, the water here is fine to drink, no worries) and came across this spider with its web. Very hard to miss, with the big white "X" right in the center of it. Went back to take some pictures, and the spider had moved to the other side of the X, so it's not visible in the shots. It's an Arigiope spider, for those who didn't know. I looked it up on the Web and had to wade through a surprisingly large amount of SpiderMan and Hulk sites to find something on it.

From Wikipedia:
The average orb web is practically invisible, and it is easy to blunder into one and end up covered with a sticky web. The very easily visible pattern of banded silk made by Argiope is pure white, and some species make an "X" form, or a zigzag type of web (often with a hollow center). The spider then aligns one pair of its legs with each of the four lines in the hollow "X," making a complete "X" of white lines with a very eye-catching spider colored bright yellow on a field of black or variegated red white and yellow stripes forming its center. The white patterns are called stabilimentum and reflect UV light. They have been shown to play a role in attracting prey to the web, and possibly to prevent its destruction by large animals

Movie Time: Rápido y Furioso

We finally had a chance to break away for a bit to go and see a movie. . . The nearest movie theatre is in Ciudad Quesada (also known as San Carlos) about 20 minutes away . . . It's a tri-plex, and our options (or so we thought) were: The Fast and the Furious 4; Escape from Witch Mountain; and Dragon Ball Z. . . It wasn't a hard choice, as only the Fast and Furious 4 was in English, the other two were dubbed in Spanish. . . It didn't hurt that Lucy is a huge Vin Diesel fan. . . Cost per person for the movie: 1800 colones (the exchange rate is around 560 colonoes to the dollar, so you can do the math); cost for popcorn, two sodas and nachos: 3800 colones. . . not a bad deal at all. . . At the concession stand, after we ordered our snacks, they gave us a big plastic tray/carrier, so we didn't have to try to balance everything while walking into the theatre. . . Wolverine is supposed to show up there on May 1, so we'll try to catch that and hope that it will be in English with Spanish subtitles. . .