After a night of high winds, which sounded like they were doing their hardest to blow our cabin down, we awoke to a lovely view down to the Gulf of Nicoya and beyond.

After breakfast we got a taxi up to the cheese factory in Monteverde, where we had a tour of the factory, sampled some of their cheeses and bought ice cream/milkshake for the long walk back to Santa Elena, which wasn’t too bad as it was mainly downhill. When we got to Santa Elena we spend a lovely few hours chilling out on the terrace of the cafe at the Orchid Gardens (using their wifi to upload my last few blog posts).

As Monteverde is most famous for cloud forests, we spent our afternoon at Salventura in the Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserve, we opted to go for the hanging bridges tour, rather than the zip lines, so that we would be able to take everything in, rather than whizzing past, scaring the wildlife. As it happens, we didn’t get to see much wildlife, either we’re just not as good at spotting it as the guides we’ve had, or the creatures have got fed up of all the noisy visitors and moved to a quieter area of the cloud forest. Even though we didn’t see many animals, it was good to see the cloud forest from the canopy, looking up from the ground, you don’t realise quite how many plants grow off the bigger trees, without touching the ground.

We finished off the day with a drink in the Tree House bar and a great meal at Johnny’s Pizzeria, then another long walk back to our cabin, luckily for us the relaxing at the beach part of our trip starts tomorrow!