Day 18: To San Gerardo de Dota

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Now, this was an interesting morning! Around 5am, we found out that a bat had inadvertently made its way into our bathroom! When we entered the bathroom, the bat would start flying frantically trying to get out.
It came in through an open window, but could not find its way out again.
This means that we had to open the door from the bathroom to the hotel room and both sliding doors outside to coax it to go away.
It did, three times actually, as the bat went out quickly, and probably didn’t like what it was seeing there as it circled around and went straight back in. It did so three times, and eventually we were too fast for him in closing the doors and away he was!
Quite an adventurous morning if I may say so.

After this, breakfast. Of course! No Gallo Pinto for me again, as they didn’t offer it today, but I was greeted by the smell of pancakes. Not bad!
The journey from Ojochal to San Gerardo de Dota is not very long, but there is a very distinct difference in height: we go from sea level to +2200 metres in about 100km!
This also means that the temperature drops quite significantly. We started out with about 30 degrees at breakfast, and arrived at the Trogon Lodge with only 10 degrees Celsius left.
As we were still wearing our shorts and flip flops, we were not quite dressed for the occasion as you might say.

We were met with a dinner, served as lunch. Two full plates of food! We quickly changed into something more appropriate as it was still only 13 degrees with rain. After this, we decided to walk to a nearby waterfall, which led to Kirsten finding her own male Quetzal! He was sitting just feet from us, and we took some amazing pictures.
The Lodge also has a nice balcony at the restaurant, where we pretty much spent the rest of the afternoon trying to take pictures of the resident Hummingbirds. Quite nice!

The Lodge itself it laid out very much like Hobbiton, only the houses are full sized and not built into the hills.
Tomorrow, we’ll go on a Quetzal spotting tour first, while after breakfast we will go find any other animals residing in these high Tropical Cloud Forests.
After that, we drive to San Jose already…