Christmas presents for the Institute

A combination of packed days and flaky internet means I'm quite behind.  I hope all blippers had as good a Christmas as we are having.

Christmas day!  We started the day with a visit to the Monteverde Institute.  Well, more accurately, we visited the home of one of the main men.  He introduced us to one aspect of their work – growing large numbers of trees to help landowners to reforestation areas, particularly along watercourses, to create connectivity between different areas of forest in Costa Rica, whilst at the same time reducing evaporation from the streams. 

We then spent an hour or so filling plastic bags with compost, into which the nursery manager will plant tree seeds. They use a mixture of topsoil from building sites and compost created from restaurant and other businesses organic waste. 1st extra shows most of our output.

Whilst here, I photographed the beautiful butterfly in extras, the banded peacock.

Then we went down to the house, where we had a slide presentation about one aspect of their work – helping with a study about the bellbird - you can read a summary on the blog, and the importance of connecting together the various forests in Costa Rica.  And we had lunch.

After lunch, I met up with W (who had stayed at the hotel nursing his cold) and we went off to tackle the hanging bridges. W doesn’t have a good head for heights – getting across these bridges was quite a feat (3rd extra).  And the terrain in between was quite hilly.

In the evening, most of us went for a meal at a restaurant with a lovely view of the sunset. Our guide E posed for me with the little Xmas hat.  I was exhausted by the end - coming down with the head cold that has been doing the rounds in our group.  We were in bed and asleep before 9pm.