We woke up, ate breakfast, and gathered our things, but before we had finished packing, we were interrupted by a troop of howler monkeys climbing through the trees around our villa. It was late enough in the morning that there was no howling going on; we speculate they were foraging. They ended up in some trees right next to our villa and we ran from patio to various windows inside, trying to get better looks at each of them.In the meantime Dylan was continuing to “accidentally” allow Nacho to sneak into our villa:
After the monkey excitement, we checked out and went to Palí to get some snacks for the rest of our trip. We then went back to the place we had had dinner a couple nights earlier, grabbed some lunch, and said our goodbyes to Samara.
One think that struck me as interesting on the trip was how different the scenery was on each one of our drives. Leaving Samara i drove thorough 5 minutes of light rain ( the only time I had to drive in the rain on the whole trip), and initially we were backtracking so there wasn’t anything new to see. However, after almost an hour we were on a route we had not been on before. Thankfully we were on a “major” highway… still one lane in each direction, but very well paved. This was good and bad. Good because it was smooth, bad because lots of slooooow moving traffic also took this road.
We tried to keep our eyes open for more wildlife, but by this portion of our Costa Rica trip, the diligence necessary to spot things was hard to muster. After driving through the “dry” forest for a while, we ended up along the coast driving through the city of Puntarenas. This was by far the largest city we had driven through thus far. There was actually what appeared to be industrial building and some distribution facilities and warehouses. That was a first for our eyes since arriving in Costa Rica.
After a short stint along the coast, our road turned to the east to take us inland to Alajuela. This portion of the drive was interesting in that it followed a large meandering river, but it followed it high up on the slopes of the mountain. There were a few bridges we drove over that took us from one side of the gorge to another. There weren’t any towns along this stretch which was unfortunate as Dylan now had to go to the bathroom. I looked every where for a place for him to go, but I was uncomfortable just pulling along the side of the road for him while in a foreign country and no locations presented them to us. The few off-ramps we came across did not appear to have a corresponding on-ramp to get back on the road. Finally at our exit, there was a small restaurant that I stopped at and Dylan ran to the bathroom.
After that it was a short drive to Hotel Robledal and we were back where our adventure had started for our last night. Emauel who had shown us all of the creatures and critters on our first night was busy with a group of businessmen that were having a conference at the hotel. He invited us to go to a farm to see more wildlife, but we had just arrived and it would be a two hour excursion, so we declined.