Last saturday I went on a bike ride on the Saratoga Gap trail. It was a pretty easy ride until we got on a very narrow and steep section leading to tabletop mountain. It turns out that this section of the trail was close to bikes, so we decided to head back before losing too much altitude.
About a half mile from the exit my front wheel slipped over the embankment and I clamped down hard on my brakes to avoid careening down the hillside. As my bike tipped over to one side I though to myself “this is going to hurt”, but was pleasantly surprised when my fall was broken by a nice green bush with generous leaves.
When I stood up and dusted myself off, I realized that my savior was a poison oak bush! I raced home and put tecnu all over my arms and legs and hoped for the best.
Now it’s been a few days and the spots I got with the technu have had mild outbreaks. I missed a big spot on my back though and that now itches like crazy. I don’t think I’ve ever had it this bad and I can even feel my lymph nodes in the surrounding area surrounded by what must be dead tissue of some kind.
Ick!
Today we went on a nature tour of the cloud forest of Monteverde. A tour guide picked us up at the Arco Iris lodge around 7:30am and we rode in a small tour bus to the park. The weather was partly clouding, by which I mean that whenever a cloud blew through the area, it was like it was raining, though the rain didn’t exactly seem to fall from the sky as much as appear.
We were a small group of tourists led by our eager guide who had grown up in St Elena. As soon as we started the hike we saw a lot of different tropical plants and huge trees overgrown with what seemed like hundreds of different species of mosses and ferns. The weird thing about the cloud forest is that most of the plants in the canopy take their nourishment from other plants and may not even leave roots in the ground. The scenery was amazing, especially on the suspension bridges that ran through the canopy. You really get the feeling that you are in the trees.
We saw a couple of monkeys and a spectacular green bird known as the Quetzal. Overall I wouldn’t say that this part of the trip was as good as I had hoped. Although the cloud forest was indeed huge and majestic, the actual park wasn’t that different from the reserve at Salvatura.
After the tour ended we stopped in St Elena for lunch and then wandered about the small town looking for souveniers for our return to the states.
