Not wanting to break with tradition...

This was the "startling lawn mower inhabitant du jour"

Seriously, I'm going to quit mowing the lawn if things don't quit
jumping out of the mower and scaring the crap out of me. I've gotten
accustomed to enormous toads by the mower, to CARRFULLY pulling off
the mower cover to avoid black widows, to lizards the size of my leg
being under the cover.... But today I thought I was in the clear. I
had hauled the mower all the way to the front yard, bouncing it over
patio and stepping stones, and was JUsT ready to turn it on when this
guy came shooting out the grass trap, scuttling across my foot, in
full pissed ninja crab mode. Not wanting to break with tradition, I
squealed again. Loudly.

Thank goodness he came out before I turned on the blades. That would
have been a mess.

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
The last picture is my "happy" boots. Did I mention it was muddy? And it speaks of a very happy girl, as the pile of clothes indicates we just found the second waterfall. That cold water felt amazing by this time of the day!

That's actually the second waterfall behind Steve in the 3rd picture. We had a hard time trying to pick our way down to it.

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
The second picture? That huge tree overhead? It's a fern.

The third picture makes me grin - someone before us had built cairns all up and down the riverbed - this one in particular looked like a little dude contemplating the falls. Steve fit in very nicely.

The last picture is yet another amazing rock formation in the middle of the stream

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
Here's a really good shot of the first waterfall, and how amazing the rocks below it are. The third picture is of Steve climbing up the rock wall, and the last picture is of him looking back down over it.

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
Steve, climbing up to the first of the waterfalls.

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
Steve, looking dapper in dapples, playing orangutan, and taking a breather in the river downstream from the waterfalls.

Me, on the trail. Yeah, really. There's a trail there. I swear. (we couldn't see it too well either)

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
The frist picture is just after climbing the rock wall. There was no great way to cross from one side to the other - you were forced to stay on the edge of the wall where the water was shallow, but there was no way I was standing up on those slicker-than-snot-on-a-doorknob rocks when a 40 foot drop was waiting on the other side. There was nothing to do really but a most ungraceful butt-scoot.

La Coca Trail

 
 
 
 
Ok - finally getting around to finishing up the pictures of the rainforest trip last weekend. The pictures I'm posting tonight are kinda jumbled and out of order; the program I use to publish to the web is putting up a fight tonight and in the name of getting this done, I'm just going to post them in the order they came up.

We decided to do La Coca Trail on the advice of one of the local blogs I follow. In their opinion, it is the prettiest, most untraveled, and most jungle-like of the trails. It's also the hardest trail in the park, and not on any of the published trail maps. Yep, you throw those descriptions at us, and we're suckers. We're GOING to go. Length-wise, the trail's only 1.5 miles in and then the same distance back out. Not long. The kicker is that it changes elevation close to 800 feet in that mile and a half. Still not too bad. The kicker is the mud. Everything is slick, snotty, boot-suckin mud. THAT made it really difficult. If you weren't fighting not to skate down a cliff face on your butt, you were fighting to get you foot dislodged from sticky goo. They recommended giving yourself 6 hours to do the hike. We spent 4 hours, and didn't even make it to the end. Granted, most of that was because we had to play in every waterfall we passed along the way, but if you ask me, that's most of the fun.

The last 3 photos are from the first waterfall we came to. The rock going up to is was really amazing - it made its own natural ladder for us. I liked the way the water was running around my boot as I stepped up the face too. This was right before I got my boot stuck and tore the heck out of the toe of it trying to get free. As Steve puts it, they're now "happy boots"

Back at the hotel ...

 
 
 
 
Hungry and tired, and happy! What a fun day!

The lobby of the hotel is open to the outdoors, and we could hear a coqui singing, so we went to track it down. Coquis are really, REALLY loud to begin with; this little guy landed himself in a plant in the corner of a marble hallway, so he was amplified. It's crazy to think such a big sound comes out of such a little frog!

Incidentally, I found out some cool stuff about coquis. First off, only the males make the call. They're named after the sound they make, so the call sounds like "ko-kee, ko kee" The "ko" part is only for the males, and it establishes their territory. The "kee" sound is only for the females, and it's a mating call. According to wikipedia, the females and males auditory spectrum is narrow enough that they can only hear the part of the call that's intended for them. So, when you hear a frog call "ko-ko-ko-kee" The other males hear "get off get off get off my turf" and the females only hear "hey baby"