We decided to go to the botanical gardens. A shady bench in a garden was just what we needed. We flagged a taxi and told him where we were going. 2 minutes later he apologized and said that he didn’t have time to go there and dropped us off somewhere awkward to get another taxi. Nice. We walked back into the center and got in another taxi who was happy to take us. Which part of the park did we want “arriba” or “abajo”? No idea. We went for “arriba” as it was hot and we could walk downhill instead of uphill. This turned out to be a bad idea as the driver had taken a “short cut” cross country and eventually reached a huge muddy pool. He was going to try to cross it! We would definitely have got stuck. We told him we’d walk the rest of the way as he seemed reluctant to back up and take the proper road. Annoying.
When we reached the gate, it was clear that this wasn’t the public entrance, but the entrance to a research centre: “authorized personnel only.” There was a cop at the security post. He told us to continue along the road a couple of kilometers to the other entrance. We told him we didn’t have a car and he looked at us like we were mad – how had we got there then? We left out the bit about getting stuck in mud, but we told him that the taxi driver had gone. The cop was very sweet and let us cut through the research centre and take the steps through the cloud forest to the main entrance. Finally! We spent a nice few hours there and I think we were the only visitors not there as researchers or on business. It was very quiet and really beautiful.
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