Beneath the Canopy: Walking the Hanging Bridges of Mistico Arenal

You step off the bus and the air changes—heavy, sweet, alive. It smells of wet earth and a dozen green things that have forgotten the word winter. The trail at Mistico Arenal Hanging Bridges Park begins with a soft clack beneath hiking shoes and the distant, insistent bark of howler monkeys announcing their territory. Up ahead, a narrow wooden span sways gently between two great emergent trees; the canopy above is a stitched ceiling of leaves, orchids and hummingbird traffic. For a few long strides you are suspended between world and world: below, the understory, damp and dark; above, the coronas of the rainforest where toucans and tanagers make their mornings.