Monkey Beats Ant

Yesterday we finally saw a monkey, while we were hiking at Mirador el Silencio-- a private nature reserve which I highly recommend because the admission is supercheap and because we saw a spider monkey swinging through the dense jungle, doing all kinds of monkey antics, and then the trail ascends out of the jungle into the cloud forest and finally ends at the 1968 lava field, where it is cold and cloudy-- a real winner of a place and we were the only people there so we had all the trails to ourselves for the three plus hours it took to navigate them; we then got snacks, plantain and yucca chips, and then descended the 500 steps the the La Fortuna Waterfall, an epic tumbling cascade of cold water that plunges straight out of the jungle; we swam in the river below the main falls, in a plethora of pacu, then we ate lunch and headed back to Los Lagos to enjoy the pools; we ran into the supernice one upper again and talked sports, we learned he was Tracy McGrady's point guard in high school and has his contact in his cell phone and then after a bit more one upping he left and we talked to some professional sporting parents from California who were so successful at raising up their giant atletic progeny that they didn't need to one up-- they talked strategy and made us feel like amateurs: their oldest son just got a full golf scholarship to Illinois and got endorsed by Foot Joy and Titleist and they retained their younger son once and were planning on doing it again so he could excel at football; both kids did not attend public school, instead they did sport specific schooling and these parents pursued all sorts of scholarships and funding, pretty wild and way out of our league; then as we were walking back to our cabana, the one upper drove by and yelled some amazing one upmanship info out the window: "I heard Soda La Hormiga, The Ant, has the best food around! Eight dollars a plate! A local guy told me . . ." and he drove off and we actually considered going there but first we needed gas and the station in town ran out so we had to wait in a line out of town and then La Hormiga was closing so we went to another place and it's a good thing because we saw the one upper's wife at breakfast and she said her son got sick from the food and it was lucky we didn't follow her husband's advice and then we sat next to them while we ate and the one upper mapped our route to Samara on his phone for us.