Saturday, June 5, 2010 – FishHook Marina and Lodge, Golfito, Costa Rica

While Mark was up at the marina this morning working on his laptop, he met Craig, an American from Santa Barbara, California, who has a house two doors down from the marina. He offered to take us up to the top of the mountain and we could walk down through the rainforest. He said we would see all kinds of wildlife and beautiful scenery without having to pay for a walk through a national park and he wasn’t kidding!





We spent about four hours walking down the mountain road and saw monkeys, anteaters, pumas, toucans, scarlet macaws (we think), small colorful lizards, coatamundi, blue morpho butterflies, a black and green poison dart tree frog and tree sloths, not to mention the flowers, plants, trees and breathtaking views. We met a couple of locals at the top of the mountain who showed us around the house they were living in as they worked on clearing property for an American company.















It took us four hours to walk the few miles down the mountain and we got to the bottom about 2:30 pm. We had planned to stop at a “soda” for lunch, but it was closed for siesta. Instead, we grabbed drinks from a small market and walked the rest of the way to the marina where we ordered lunch.

Craig was invited over to share our evening meal of good old Iowa corn fed beef tenderloin. Needless to say, the dinner was fantastic! We got to know a little bit about Craig and learned that he had delivered boats and sailed extensively on the West Coast. He had a lot of local information and good ideas about where we might stop along our way to San Diego.