The first thing you'll noticed about any Costa Rican gift shop is the sloths. There are a lot of gift shops in Monteverde so we saw a lot of sloths while we were walking around. This greatly excited Whitney. She watched a sloth documentary a while back and has loved sloths ever since. She says that they are kindred spirits because they are both lazy (they sleep 15 hours a day, which isn't anywhere close to her true sleep idol, koalas, who sleep 22 hours a day, but it is still impressive).
This is why we went trekking through the cloud forest in the dark of night. Don't worry, we didn't just stumble around, we did pay for a night tour. A night tour/night walk is just like what it sounds like -- you go walking at night to see wild animals while they are out doing their wild animal things. A lot of these animals are nocturnal so it's their time to shine! Whitney's goal was to see a sloth, my goal was to not come face to face with something that wanted to eat me.
Now, before we get to the animals, let me tell you that our tour guide was everything I aspire to be in life and by that, I mean he was a supreme sass master. Most of our tour group was couples or if not couples, then a couple of travelers like me and Whit, but there was one family of four on the tour. Families are cool, I have no problem with families.I do, however, have a problem with idiots and this family got under everyone's skin from the start. Not to judge, but they had a daughter who could not have been older than 10 who would not stop talking. They did absolutely nothing to keep her quiet either. In fact, the parents and older brother let her pester the rest of the group while they ignored the guide and wandered away from the group. I guess I can't be surprised that your child is difficult when you've named her Steal (or more likely Steel or even Steele or another one of the many ways to spell a very simple name in a complicated way for the sake of being trendy). At one point, our guide told the group "some tourists think they know everything because you give them a flashlight." The parents and brother got so far behind that the entire group had to go back and look for them. The next time that happened, our guide had us shut off our flashlights to play a game called "Tourists lost in the jungle," Steel ignored him and yelled until her family caught up. Because shouting in the dead of night is the perfect way to not scare away all of the animals we're trying to see. When they weren't wandering, the family would pull focus by claiming they'd seen something that would always turn out to be nothing. Also, how did the child end up with the brightest flashlight?! I'm lucky I could see any it'of the animals since she kept swinging it around and blinding the rest of the group by shining it into our eyes.
Rant over. The first thing we saw was a crab in a stream. We were told not to shine our lights directly onto the animals and I'm sure you know that those directions were followed by 100% of the group if you read the last paragraph. We saw frogs and butterflies and then we heard that another group had seen a porcupine in tree so we went to find it, but we didn't. We kept on our happy trail and then up in the trees, we saw IT.
No, not Pennywise the Clown! A sloth. Apparently it was a baby sloth. It was up in the trees and was surprisingly agile! It actually moved with some speed which shocked everyone except the guide who said that the little ones tend to move a lot faster. It worked to get away after someone shone the flashlight directly at it... Either way, Whitney was in heaven. The tour could have ended right there and she would tell you that she got her money's worth. I managed to get a picture of the sloth but it doesn't look exactly like a sloth, more like a spot of brown surrounded by green. Nighttime conditions are not ideal and the lighting that I did have kept changing because of people and their stupid flashlights.
Moving on from there, we saw more frogs and butterflies but we also saw a sleeping hummingbird (which everyone agreed felt weird because we'd never seen them sit still before), a venomous pit viper and a boa constrictor in a tree. It was very exciting.
The good news is that Whitney has not yet attempted to store a sloth in her luggage but it isn't for lack of trying! I don't think she could get it through customs even if she managed to catch one but you never know.
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