Hiking! Bat Caves! Watering Holes! Rocks!

This was a day of directional challenges for Ben and Hart. We started off with one of our friends to find a water hole about 30ish minutes from the station. The journey took about an hour. We spent some time there listening to the howler monkeys in the trees, watching the cane toad in the stream, and scrabbling over some rocks. It was a lovely break from the hot sun on the road. Then Jess headed back to the station for lunch, while Ben and I trotted up to find a bat cave. Yeah, bat-cave. Super cool, right? Except it proved to be quite elusive, so we spent the rest of the morning exploring different trails and watching wide-eyed (and with a wee bit of "miedo") as white-faced monkeys screamed as us and shook branches in the canopy. This species travels in groups of twenty--quite a lot of monkeys in a barrel--and are fully omnivorous, eating the infants of other monkeys, fruit, leaves, eggs, etc. It was quite amazing. After we finally declared the bat-cave to be lost, we hiked up to a rocky look-out point. We could see the whole park with the marsh in the basin and deciduous forest along the mountains. Very beautiful.