Costa Rica - Creatures, Flowers and a Weird Dessert

Back to the start of our vacation: We grabbed a cab from the airport and began our 90 minute trip to the resort.


The cabbie pulled over at a souvenier shop so that we could walk a bridge to see these crocs. There were lots of them and they were bigger than I could imagine. I've never seen crocodiles in the wild before. It was the first glimpse of this other world.



We saw a few of these Variegated Squirrels on the resort. Not seen in the picture is a wide black stripe down his back.



What we thought was a seal in the water near the shore, was actually a Sea Turtle. We saw it surface many times but this was the only snapshot I could get. I was shocked to discover it was, in fact a sea turtle, only after I printed it out.



A Leafcutter Ant highway, using this fence. We were told, that in just 1 colony, the ants outnumber all of the Costa Rican population. Thats over 4 million per colony.


A Heliconia Flower which resembles a lobsters claw, only...pretty.



I never did find out what this plant was, but I like to call it the pineapple plant.



This was my favorite flower on the resort. It is a Laurel Clockvine.


Now for the dessert...

We were eating a surprisingly good pizza at our favorite resort joint, and decided we wanted something sweet. We check the menu and see the listings of desserts. The illustration showed a banana split. Right above the picture, were the words: Ice cream, jelly, & fruit.

(For illustration purposes, I created a fake menu)
We thought, o.k., topping is jelly; fruit is banana; we are good!
We ask the waiter if we could have the ice cream, fruit, and jelly. We asked what flavors of ice cream and he told us vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. We pointed to the picture and said we wanted 1 for the both of us to share. He looked at us funny, said he could do that, and left. He came back a few minutes later carrying our order, set it down and left. We just looked at it...


We looked at each other. We laughed until we cried. There was a scoop of vanilla ice cream along side some red jello, and fruit cocktail, all in a bowl. (My fake photo illustration above is pretty accurate!) Where did we go wrong? Jelly is not jello. Where is the banana? Where is the 3 flavors of ice cream? The language barrier just exploded. At first, we thought that maybe this is a Costa Rican dessert? Who knew? We then attempted a taste. Ummm...not good. There is no flavor explosion with this marriage. We then question the menu. We remember the listings and think that when we asked for all 3 flavors of icecream, the waiter thought all 3 desserts. I can't imagine what he thought when he was putting this concoction together. We ate what we could, so as to not offend, and laughed in between horrible bites. Oh well, it was pretty funny to us, so we left a big tip!

This post is the final in the series: Costa Rica at a Glance