February 15. Day 6. Orosi Valley to Taus

Today's Description:  After breakfast, we mountain bike along a river to the Tapanti National Wildlife Refuge.  This is an area of vast rugged terrain covered with dense primary rainforest.  Leaving our bikes, we take to the mountains trekking amongst thousands of trees covered with ferns, bromeliads, mosses and other epiphytes.  The end of the day finds us on flatter ground, camping near the small settlement of Taus.

Biking:  10 km
Hiking:  13 km
Ascent:  680m.  Descent:  1035m.

A leisurely start to the day this morning.  Breakfast at 7:30 in the hotel dining room.  Ready to go by 8:30.

I should have clued in when the notes said we were staying in the Orosi Valley.  Lots of uphill in the 10 km of biking.  We had a bit on a paved road, and then back onto dirt road again.  Not too bad, though.  A pretty good surface, and not too steep either up or down.  We had to walk across a rather sketchy bridge; there were more than a few planks missing here & there.

Oh, but, look............ here comes Memo & our support truck!  Glad all my possessions didn't end up at the bottom of the river.

We stopped for our "transition" shortly after the bridge.  Time for a bit of a break and some food set out to pack up for lunches.

There were a number of trees on the property with distinctive and numerous pendulum-type nests.  These are the nests of the Montezuma Oropendola bird.  There were lots of these birds (black or dark brown with vibrant yellow tails) flying about and working on their nests, but I didn't get any pictures of them.  Lots of photos of the nests, though.

After a good long break, we were ready to hike about 13 km.  We started hiking at 10:20 and finished close to 3pm.  This included a decent stop for lunch beside a creek running over the road.  Fez was good enough to build us a little bridge and then help us across.  The first 3km was uphill to our maximum elevation, and then largely downhill from there.  Some good views down into the valley from our walk uphill, including a good view of our transition area.

A bit of a roadblock; not sure how long it's been like that.

Here's Fez (and Ernesto) helping  us across his freshly placed stepping stones.

Huge colonies of leafcutter ants this afternoon.  All hard at work................

We had very pleasant weather today.  Not too hot; not too cold.  As we descended, the vegetation started to change.  It became much more lush and more of the big-leafed plants reappeared.  We came across a large area of sugarcane plants.  Fez cut one down and gave us a sample to suck on.  Yum!

We're definitely back in the rainforest!

Apparently the area we're going through today receives about 7m of rain a year.  Yikes!  It drizzled a bit during the hike this afternoon, but once again our timing was perfect.  Just moments after we reached our shelter for the night the skies opened and the downpour began.  Since it's an area know for its rain, Memo and Graham were smart enough to pitch the tents inside the shelter.

We're in a shelter next to a school near the small settlement of Taus.  There are good kitchen facilities, but the toilet and showers are pretty basic (and cold!).  Some folks went for a swim in the river and then Fez gave us info for the next 3 days.  We won't see our luggage during that time (we just get to take a daypack) so it was a bit humourous to watch everyone explode their bags and then try to figure out what to take with them.