Thursday, January 2

On our last day we began by driving to the La Paz Waterfall Gardens and Wildlife Refuge.  This is an enormous privately owned park, and the “Wildlife Refuge” is a zoo with local animals very well displayed, but a zoo nonetheless.  It is well embedded into the hills of the area and allowed us to see some wildlife of Costa Rica which is otherwise very hard to get to view as a tourist.  There is a giant bird area enclosed with netting, but so giant that you think you’re in an open valley.  One of the toucans there is very tame:

The butterfly garden is wonderful and allowed us to get up close to the very special Blue Morpho which we had seen in the wild but had trouble getting close to:

Mammals in cages are the worst part of a zoo, and despite the fact that the animals looked well cared for and had lots of room, it’s still troublesome to me.  Here’s a baby ocelot:

I have lots more mammal photos, but I see no need to send them. There's an oxcart painted as the locals do, with a brace of oxen:

Part of the attraction here is a series of waterfalls with extremely well-done very long paths and stairs to them:

After lunch at La Paz, we drove to a coffee plantation and had a walking tour of the farm and the processing plant; more than Josh really wanted to know about coffee, but we found it interesting.  Here’s how the coffee cherries are picked by hand, a tedious job done mostly by Nicaraguan immigrants, as the Costa Ricans don’t want to do such terrible farm work for very low wages.  Sound familiar?

Josh very much enjoyed a delicious mocha:

Well, that’s it.  We arrived late afternoon at the San Jose Marriott, and we are scheduled to fly home tomorrow.  We’ll see how that goes, as there’s a big cold storm in the northeast!  Thanks for reading our adventure with Josh.