Roatan Bird Park

My flight to San Jose, Costa Rica left at one o'clock this afternoon, which gave me just enough time to have a quick breakfast, e-mail home, and visit a local bird and butterfly park before heading to the airport. The butterfly park was alright. It wasn't nearly as nice as the bird park near Copan, but for half the entrance fee I guess I should be satisfied with half the experience. The highlight was an enclosure near the entrance filled with hundreds of butterflys. There really were only a few different species in there, but it still was fun. It literally was hard to walk even a few feet without seeing a few butterflys fly right in front of me. The place reminded me a little bit of a butterfly park I went to in Kuala Lumpur, except that one was a lot bigger and had much better landscaping and tons of different species of exotic butterflys. I think it even cost less to get into too. This place was still fun though, they also had a small enclosure that visitors can walk through that has five or six toucans in it. I got within just a few inches of a couple of toucans to snap some pictures. I also watched as a toucan picked up bits of melon from a pie tin, tossed them up into the air with his beak, and caught and swallowed them.

After a flight to San Jose that took five hours, included three layovers, and netted me only a four-hundred mile trip south of Roatan, I headed into the city to find a place to stay for the night.

I feel like I'm becoming a more competant traveler than I used to be. As I left the airport in San Jose there was a hoard of taxi drivers offering their services to incoming tourists. The problem with taxi drivers at airports is that they figure that they can charge whatever they want because tourists have no idea how to get into the city except to catch a cab. When I arrived in Belize City two weeks ago a cab from the airport to the pier, about a ten mile drive, cost twenty-five dollars - a ridiculous amount of money for a developing country. What's worse is that there was a big foul-mouthed Belizian man there regulating the cabs and making sure that tourists didn't arrange to share a taxi and split the cost with each other. I was a little uneasy about traveling alone in Central America at the time so I just forked over the twenty-five bucks instead of finding a cheaper alternative, but now I feel a lot more comfortable with those situations. At the airport here in San Jose I knew just enough Spanish to ask where the nearest bust stop was, how much the bus cost, if the bus went to San Jose, and if the driver had change for a large bill. The net result was that I paid less than a dollar for the ten-mile ride to San Jose and another dollar for a cab in town to take me to my hotel. That felt a whole lot better than succumbing to a demand for twenty dollars from one of the cabbies at the airport.