Carara

Carara is a national park about ten miles north of Jaco.  The red dot on the map shows the location. 

Carara National Park

It is a rain forest environment and therefore has a lot of plants, animals, birds, AND bugs.  We drove there with Chuck and Sharon Cobbs and hired a guide (Armando) to show us the park and its inhabitants.
The forest/jungle was pretty dense and hot so we wore cool clothes and covered ourselves with inspect spray.

Trekking through Carara

One of the first things that impressed me was how big the trees were.

Many of the trees do not have deep root systems so they put out a large base of roots for stability.

One of the most lovely trees you see all over the mountain side is called either "Brazilian Fire" because of it's color or "Chicken Feet" because of it's roots.  I like "Brazilian Fire".

Brazilian Fire

One of the first things Armando wanted to show us as we began walking through the forest was a very rare black and green poisonous dart frog.  The natives used to rub their darts on this frog to get the poison to kill their prey.  He knew where this frog lived and had shown it to many visitors in the past.  We would be so lucky to be able to catch a glimpse of this rare species.   He began gently brushing back the undergrowth trying to find this rare black and green poisonous dart frog. Chuck and I were getting our cameras ready.  Finally, "There it is" he said.  As we all pressed forward, Sharon bent over to get a closer look.  As she did, her sun glasses slipped off her head and plummeted to the ground coming very close to skewering the rare black and green poisonous dart frog.  He was gone!  We looked and looked.  Armando was frantically trying to find the rare black and green poisonous dart frog once more.  No luck.  
Later in our tour we returned to this same spot to see if he had returned.  But no, he was no where to be found.  Armando explained that he would probably never return because he now sensed danger having been almost skewered by the jeweled sunglasses of the blond Gringo lady.
Since we did not see the rare black and green poisonous dart frog, Gail asked Armando if he had a picture of it.  So what you have here is a picture of the rare black and green poisonous dart frog that I took from a page in Armando's Guide Book.  

(More of this story to follow in a later blog.)

Very rare black and green poisonous dart frog.

 We continued on and eventually Armando began talking to us again.
Armando had a telescope and we could take pictures through it of the animals occupying the tree tops.

We saw a lot of tree top dwellers--Birds

and bats.

Albino Bat

 Creepy Little Devils but they can eat up to 500 mosquitoes in one night.
The best part of the tour was walking through this wonderful area and seeing the various types of plants.

We saw many other animals like Iguanas and leaf cutting ants. There are way too many pictures to put on the blog. 

We made it home in time to see the sunset.