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I bet you thought I forgot, right? I drifted off into a nap and when I awoke I failed to remember to blog about the sloths, eh? Well, you are incorrect. I was swamped with work. It ate my soul. Many a day went by where I had to choose between eight more minutes of precious sleep or a shower. It was not fun. But now the deadlines are slowing up, so I can return to bringing you the quality vacation reporting you have come to expect from this fine establishment. So here’s what you’ve been waiting for. Visit www.AllWorld.com to read travel-related articles and plan your next domestic or international travel.

The Sloth Sanctuary! (Or as I like to call it, The Slorphanage.) The Moomins and I pulled up at the gate and we were greeted by a giant sculpture of what sloths looked like in the time of the dinosaurs. Short answer: they were big.

We then met the lady in charge, an American woman named Judy who married a Costa Rican man and has lived and run this hotel / sanctuary for several decades. As we were talking to her in front of the reception area I saw a hanging wicker chair. Now, most people wouldn’t give two thoughts to a hanging wicker chair, but I happen to know that Princess Buttercup, the mascot of the sanctuary and the very first sloth they rescued twenty years ago, lives in a wicker chair. So I freaked out a bit. I asked Judy’s daughter Ursula, “Ummmm, is that Princess Buttercup over there?” and Ursula said cheerfully, “Why yes, that’s Her Royal Highness. Why don’t you go say hi?” I don’t think Ursula had finished the sentence before I sprinted across the room. Princess Buttercup was glorious.

I startled her a little bit, so she awoke and paid about thirty seconds of attention to me.

I got some footage just as her disinterest in me manifested itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byIO5g2nUmI

Princess Buttercup is a three-fingered sloth. There’s a movement to call them “three-fingered” and “two-fingered” instead of “three-toed” and “two-toed” because all sloths have three big claws on their back feet. It’s the front claws that matter. I learned so much about sloths. They are fascinating and extremely bizarre. Here’s some of the things I learned.

• Three-Fingered Sloths and Two-Fingered Sloths have enough incompatible components that they are unable to cross-breed. It’s like the difference between ostriches and emus. They’re both large, creepy, dinosaur-like flightless birds, but they can’t make babies. Same with sloths.
• The Two-Fingered Sloth eats fruit and leaves and bugs. The Three-Fingered Sloth eats fruits and leaves, no bugs. Twice a day someone comes over to Princess Buttercup’s hanging chair and clips fresh leaves to the side of her chair. She doesn’t have a water bowl or anything. She gets almost all her moisture from the leaves and the occasional green bean or piece of fruit.
• Sloths poop once a week. They come down the tree and goes to the bathroom at the base of the tree. Scientists don’t really know why. There are a few theories. One, if the sloth poops from the canopy the waste will hit a million leaves on the way down, creating a ruckus and giving away the sloth’s position to possible predators. The other reasoning is super-weird: there is a moth that lives in the sloth’s fur, a “sloth moth” if you will, and when the sloth goes down to the base on the tree, the moth has enough time to lay its eggs in the poop and then hop back onto the sloth on its way back up.
• The sloth’s diet is so low in nutrition, they are practically cold-blooded. Seriously. It’s really hard for them to maintain their body temperature. In fact, it was 80 degrees when we visited and the baby orphan sloths were in incubators with blankies because they have to be 84 degrees. Awwww.
• Both sloths don’t really have collar bones and have tons of extra vertebrae in their necks, so they can rotate their heads all over the place and spin their arms and legs around to grab onto whatever branch might be near them. Since they have crazy fur that grows in all which ways it can sometimes be hard to figure out which way is up. They’re like an slow, non-threatening version of the chick in The Exorcist when she comes down the stairs backwards.
• Of the 148 sloths at the Sloth Sanctuary, only about 18 are Three-Fingered Sloths. That’s because Two-Fingered Sloths will hang out in trees near people and therefore if they are damaged, they are more often found by good Samaritans and brought to the slorphanage.

First of all, when we arrived we checked into our room (“Harpo”):

And in our hallway was something on the wall, up there, on the right. Could it be?

Yay! A little smiling bat companion. I asked Ursula about him and she said, “Yeah, that’s where he’s decided to live.”

Then Ursula said, “Have you seen the other bats?” and I was like, “There are other bats?? More bats?? Take me to the bats!” They were right outside. The wall-clingers and the ceiling-clingers.

The wall-clingers are Greater White-Lined Bats and the ceiling-clingers are the Proboscis Bat. They were delightful. I don’t know how you can’t like them: they’re cute and they eat bugs. It’s a win-win.

The next morning before our tour of the slothery we went on a hour-long boat ride on the lazy river that is part of the property. First, I took a walk through the garden. It was stunning. The colors and smells were intoxicating. And I saw a neato succulent. Its babies grow on the rim of the leaf and when passersby knock them off, they grow into new plants. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a plant that reproduces like that.

And look at this clingy flat-leaf thing.

I saw what I thought was a large porcelain crab with a blue glaze while I was taking my morning garden tour. It’s really common there to have lawn ornaments. The ones I saw were made mostly of cement. I really liked this cement anteater.

Anyway, I assumed the large blue crab was decorative. Then he scuttled halfway into his home and I jumped because hey! not a lawn ornament, very much alive.

The Moomins and I made our way to the dock. I loved that the dock had a mirror ball, you know, for any impromptu parties that might break out on this tiny dock in the middle of nowhere.

We got into the canoe and meandered our way around the area. We saw more crabs, this time coral-colored, and I loved how they looked on those root structures. To me, the roots looked like sopping wet velvet all folded up.

We saw a baby crocodile sitting in his burrow that he had dug out. He was about a foot and a half long. Little guy.

This cutie-cute bird is called a Flycatcher. I like the little dot on the top of his head.

There were some Howler Monkeys in the trees looking for tasty treats. Periodically they would make their loud powerful gutteral calls and it was strangely soothing. Here’s someone else’s video of what they sound like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHaYQWwCXZw

And here’s a photo I took of them.

I saw both types of Jesus Lizard, the brown kind and the totally-fake-couldn’t-possibly-be-real green kind.

But the bestest thing was when we went under a log that had fallen over. First of all, the log had trees growing on it, which was cool in itself. But underneath, maybe two feet from my head was… snuggling bats!!

This is a different type of bat from the bats I hung out with above, but I couldn’t figure out what kind these are, so we’re going to call them Snuggling Smiling Fuzzy Brown Bats.

Tomorrow I will show all my pics from the Slorphanage and then we are done.

Guess what? I went to another rainforest! I know, I haven’t mentioned a rainforest in the last five minutes. But hey, I went to Costa Rica to hang out with plants and animals, and that’s what I did all day every day. This particular rainforest had a research center in it and it was on the side of a mountain, so I got to go to the research center and take an open-air aerial tram through the canopy. The research center was impressive. There were shadow boxes on the wall of, and I am not making this number up, the 1,000 different species of butterfly the scientists had discovered in that particular rainforest so far. That’s a lot of butterflies. I took pictures of some of them.

And here are some giant furry moths pretending to be snakes or owls so predators won’t want to eat them.

They also had what I assume is an Orchid Bee. I’ve always wanted to see an Orchid Bee because I believe (bee-lieve! Ha ha ha!) they’re the only bees that are metallic green. On Wikipedia it says there’s another reason that the Orchid Bee is special, but I cannot figure out what it says because I do not speak science.

Euglossine bees, also called orchid bees, are the only group of corbiculate bees whose non-parasitic members do not all possess eusocial behavior.

Speaking of bugs, I saw the biggest grasshopper ever. He was like an antagonist from a 1950s drive-in movie come to life. Humongous. That’s a banana leaf it’s sitting on if you’re looking for scale.

And I saw a millipede! Well, the back third of a millipede. The rest of him was under a log. He must have been over six inches long. I am very familiar with the African Millipede who is a shiny black tube-shaped fella with evenly distributed legs. This millipede was totally different. First of all, he was brown and matte. He looked like he was made out of one of those toys little kids play with where you can make objects longer by snapping more plastic segments onto it. But the thing he has in common with the African Millipede is that when he’s scared he can shoot burny chemicals out of his butt that taste atrocious (so I’m told, I didn’t test this out myself).

We saw a plant that supposed to be unchanged since prehistoric times. It looked so fake. It felt fake too, like vinyl. I thought it was plastic until the park ranger broke off a small corner of one leaf and I could see and smell its life-fluids.

This is a Walking Tree. It’s called that because if it decides there’s more water and nutrition on the left it will kill off its roots on the right and grow new roots on the left, shifting itself about a meter. It takes about a year to do that, but considering that most trees move nowhere in a year, that’s really impressive.

• | • | • INTERMISSION  • | • | •

Since they use a lot of well-water in Costa Rica which has not been filtered in any way, it is unwise to drink from the tap. Therefore, I purchased a big bottle of local spring water every day. I took the time to read the label on this one. I really, really hope “S.T.D.” means something different in Spanish.

• | • | • INTERMISSION OVER  • | • | •

Oh, I almost forgot to include the snakes. At the research center there were some snakes in captivity and I fell in love and ached to reach through the glass for snuggle-time. My two favorites were the green vine snake:

And a brown vine snake.

Then, to get to the other research station at the bottom of the mountain we took this open-air aerial tram. It was cool. I looked straight down at one point and was astonished by the variety of shapes in the foliage.

And we went past several towering trees that are believed to be 300 years old. It’s really hard to date them because, and I found this really interesting, since there are no seasons in the rainforest the trees don’t have rings. I never realized the rings are caused by seasonal change.

Finally, here’s a tree with roots that look like walls:

And a waterfall.

Brace yourself because tomorrow… SLOTHS!