03/15/2004 monteverde, costa rica sky-trek tour
sky-trek tour: there are cables strung from towers and trees within the rain-forest. on first glance, you would think it impossible. the trees and vines are dense and there barely seems any room for people. somehow though, this company has placed these cables 700 meters (2310ft) long and 170 meters (561ft) high above the rain-forest floor, so that brave adventurers can hang in a semi-sitting position from pulleys and glide through the landscape seeing the ground and trees below, that is if they haven't secretly closed their eyes. it's scary but also exhilarating, some areas are so dense you feel you might smash your hand on a tree. only one person on our tour chickened out, and had to walk the chicken trail back to the beginning. happily it was no one in our group.

sky trek monteverde
on this first recording, three different people go across the wires. the first is me. you can hear me say bye as i fly off into the sky, and then the sound of the pulley on the cable carrying like a telephone wire communicating the sound of excitement. before i am all the way across, the tour guide prepares the next person for launch, and when he receives the beep from the other side on his two way radio indicating that i have arrived safely on the other side he sends the next person along. again, the cable communicates the sound of the pulley carrying someone to the other side. at this point, david, the person wearing the microphones, goes across the wire. this time, you hear the wind rushing and the pulley scraping on the cable as david tries to slow himself down. david reaches the other side and the tour guide on that platform proclaims "oy vay."

tour guide explaining continental divide
our tour guide explains the high hill on the continental divide we are about to climb up for the next zip-line. a large cloud covers the area, and you can hear the raindrops and the wind as he assures us that the high winds are normal.

highest zip line
on this one, we climb to the top of a tower. the tour guide was right, it is very very windy. this is the highest zip-line at 561 feet. you can hear david's jacket flapping in the wind and then the wind and the wires.

03/15/2004 monteverde, costa rica skywalk
after the sky-trek tour we decide to navigate the cloud forest by walking around on a trail for a few hours. the trail leads you through the vegetation and there are several suspension bridges throughout that are above valleys of trees and streams.

rainforest sounds
the constant background hum of birds, animal, and wind in the forest and a bird chirping.

birds singing
birds singing

mystery animal sounds
no idea what this is. at first we thought they were the howler monkeys that people told us we would likely hear. later when we heard the howler monkeys though, we realized that these were not them. my guess at this point is either some kind of bird, or some kind of laughing hyena.

suspension bridge cables
the sounds of the cables holding the suspension bridge while we are walking across it.

howler monkeys
we finally hear a howler monkey. it sounds kind of like a dog barking off in the distance. you can also hear the people on the zip-line tour screaming in the distance as they cross a scary line and you can hear the faint sound of their pulleys on the cable. i wonder if the howler monkey is responding to their loud screams. birds are chirping in the background of this recording and again there is a considerable amount of wind noise.

03/15/2004 monteverde, costa rica night forest walk
during the night tour we went on in the monteverde cloud forest, we saw many different animals and bugs, among them were: a two toed sloth, a daddy longlegs, a few praying mantis, some slugs, some crickets, a lot of vampire bats, two tarantulas, a few frogs, a sleeping flycatcher bird (mountain elenie?), and a sleeping emerald toucan.

night forest tour quide, crickets, frogs
our night tour guide explains the sounds you hear in monteverde forest at night. most of the sounds are crickets, but you can also hear the sound of the dink (or hammer) frog.

night forest sounds
thirty seconds of sounds from our walk back to the trapp family lodge.

03/16/2004 keel-billed toucans we saw on the drive to arenal lake, costa rica
toucans
as we were driving along some road we saw about 6 keel-billed toucans in a tree. we stopped to try to get some pictures but they flew away quickly and we barely got a picture of one of them. i think the kind of comb-scraping sound on this recording is from the toucans.

i will upload more sounds from my trip to costa rica soon.
if you would like to see the pictures i took while in costa rica, go see my audible frequency: visual page.