Day 10 September 24 Savegre Cloud Forest Go GATORS

Early morning wake up, but not to the howler monkeys.  We enjoyed our breakfast and about 730AM we met our guide for our morning tour in search for the quetzal.  We search for about 30 – 45 minutes before we saw the first male bird.  The males are much colorful than the females.  We stayed in this area for about 2 ½ to 3 hours and saw 4 male and 2 female quetzals.  It was so exciting.  Don’t get me wrong, I am no birder but after all the years of hearing about how difficult it can be to see the quetzals, I was so excited.  Savegre has over 22 miles of hiking trails and we hiked about 3 miles through the forest.  On our hike we saw the many differences in the environment, from the páramo, with its sparse dwarf plants, to the majestic cloud forest and its abundant flora and fauna.  We returned to the lodge about 1230PM and following our lunch we decided we would walk to the waterfall.  Well about the time we walked down the hill – you guessed it the rain started; we got an umbrella and decided to walk anyway.  We walked about a mile down the road saw where there were people  trout fishing and decided to head back to the lodge and by the time we made it back it was really raining hard!  So it was nap time again!  We got up and headed to the bar as it was Saturday and Saturday means Gator Football and we were playing Kentucky!  This week we were able to listen to the radio as well as the blog with Gator Scott on http://www.gatorzone.com/ so life was good.  We did have to laugh as a group arrived to the lodge and about 5 or 6 people from Kentucky sat right next to us.  They just told us to wait until basketball season!  Anyway, after the game we went back to the room to get ready to depart for San Jose as our vacation was fast coming to an end.