We spent our next to last night in Costa Rica in the farming village of Upala in the NW part of the country, a good jumping off point for exploring the Cano Negro Refuge. We originally planned to spend the night in Liberia but since Connie flawlessly navigated us around San Jose we had time to reach Upala yesterday.
The hotel owner, Victor, called his friend Pedro/Santiago (it seems he answers to both names who is a local guide and arranged a boat for us this morning. It is the only way to see the refuge's lagoons and rivers. It took more than an hour for the 20 miles of tooth-rattling road but we arrived almost on time. We had the entire 20 person boat to ourselves while we saw other smaller boats packed with tourists. Santiago was pretty good with the birds and helped Connie to find several new ones including two of the three she had targeted that are found only in the region. We also saw our first - and about 99 more - caiman, a relative of the crocodile and I got some good photos of howling howler monkeys, "mono congo" in Spanish.
