VOLCANIC ACTIVITY PART I
So one of the reasons that we chose the Arenal Observatory Lodge was because someone said online that they couldn't see the volcano the entire time they were there because it was too cloudy, except for one night when they awoke at 4am to rumbling sounds and saw the red hot rocks spewing out of the top. Since I really wanted to see the eruption while we were there (and was sure it would happen at 4am), I opened all of the shades to the big windows so that we could face the volcano all night in case it happened. Well, even though there was the little problem that we were sleeping and our eyes were closed...
But the trusty volcano warned me exactly when it was erupting with lots of thunderous rumbling (it really sounded like thunder actually), and I woke up really delirious. I was so delirious, in fact, that I couldn't figure out if the volcano was actually erupting. I didn't have my glasses on, so all I saw was this red glow, and I kept staring at it trying to figure out if it was the volcano or not. Finally after a few minutes I got my senses back and realized that, actually, it was just the light on my camera battery charger, and I was looking at the wall and not the window. Yeah... When I decided to look at the window I thought maybe I saw some redness, but it also looked kind of foggy, and I was too exhausted and lazy to get up to get my glasses, so I just went back to sleep. I would have probably tried harder, but I figured there was always the next night.
MORNING HIKE
We went to the dining hall around 7:30am for the buffet breakfast. There were all these choices, like different fruits, eggs, bacon, gallo pinto (rice and beans), buttered pastries, pancakes, and these really delicious puffs of fried potato with some meat in the middle. Also, lots of delicious juices like the passionfruit I had the night before and guava! The actual dining hall was also really nice because the sunlight was streaming in on all sides, and you had Arenal Lake out one window and Arenal Volcano out the other. After breakfast we tried to go outside to take some pictures, but it was getting near 8:30am, so we figured we'd head to the reception to catch the tour.
View of the lake from the dining hall.
Breakfast.
Reception area.While we were waiting for the tour this old American guy with a big telescope wearing some army colored outfit walked around and told us the tour would be starting as soon as "the karma level rises." We figured this guy was the tour guide, but then this other Costa Rican guy named Eduardo came around and introduced himself as the tour guide. The old American dude turned out to be a helper guide, but really he was just some guy who liked being there a lot and started doing a lot of wildlife watching and eventually just stayed. He gave a lot of useful commentary in the beginning though, before he disappeared to explore the volcano or something.
There were probably 20 people in our group, but I guess you have to expect that from a free tour. They were fun though, one woman was fascinated by everything and added the commentary, "Oh, WOW!" to every single thing that Eduardo said. We started off with a leisurely stroll near the pool towards the volcano, which turned out to be lined with lots and lots of howler monkeys. Actually, Eduardo was really good at making howler monkey imitations, I wish I'd caught him on tape. Since both guides had telescopes, we were able to get a good look at their darling faces, and there was even a little baby in the mother's arms. Then the volcano erupted, and we saw giant boulders rolling down the side of the mountain. Eduardo mentioned later that Arenal volcano is actually about half the temperature of the volcanoes in Hawaii, so unlike in Hawaii, it's not hot enough to create molten liquid lava, and what we actually see are red hot pyroclastic rocks. So I think that Fodor's (and wikipedia) actually lied by referring to the "lava flows" that you can see from Arenal (though I don't know much about lava, so maybe the rocks are actually considered part of "lava"?).
There were probably 20 people in our group, but I guess you have to expect that from a free tour. They were fun though, one woman was fascinated by everything and added the commentary, "Oh, WOW!" to every single thing that Eduardo said. We started off with a leisurely stroll near the pool towards the volcano, which turned out to be lined with lots and lots of howler monkeys. Actually, Eduardo was really good at making howler monkey imitations, I wish I'd caught him on tape. Since both guides had telescopes, we were able to get a good look at their darling faces, and there was even a little baby in the mother's arms. Then the volcano erupted, and we saw giant boulders rolling down the side of the mountain. Eduardo mentioned later that Arenal volcano is actually about half the temperature of the volcanoes in Hawaii, so unlike in Hawaii, it's not hot enough to create molten liquid lava, and what we actually see are red hot pyroclastic rocks. So I think that Fodor's (and wikipedia) actually lied by referring to the "lava flows" that you can see from Arenal (though I don't know much about lava, so maybe the rocks are actually considered part of "lava"?).
Hanging bridge.
Our guide Eduardo.We walked a bit through the forest and then stopped for a while under a little shaded area for "storytime." It was a really long while actually, because there wasn't enough bench space to seat everyone, and I was getting tired and had to go to the bathroom, so I stopped paying attention towards the end of the story. Eduardo basically gave some information about the volcano and then proceeded to recap what happened the first time it erupted in 1968 (it's funny because he doesn't pronounce like half of his syllables, so he was saying things like "e-ru-tion" and "sei-mo-gra").
Before the first eruption, people lived on the slopes and called Arenal the "mountain," with no knowledge that it was actually a volcano. When stuff started falling down in their houses they thought it was mice, and when there were rumbling sounds they thought it was an airplane ("that was bad information" says Eduardo). Finally there was an eruption and a hundred or so people were killed by either the hot ash or giant boulders. Then Eduardo showed us a piece of volcanic rock that already had some seedlings growing on it. After the eruptions, bird poop with seeds in it replanted the soil, which was really rich with potassium and calcium.
There was apparently this cowboy that started to flee the area a week before the eruption, and the people asked him why he was leaving, and he said it was because of the volcano. They all thought he was crazy because "that's a mountain, not a volcano!" but he warned them that all of the animals had already started to run away from the mountain base. Then of course the thing erupted. This story really made me think about people, the fact that we are so far removed from our instincts that we can override fear with logic (even if it's incorrect logic). In some ways it makes us dumber than animals, that we can't even have common sense to run away from a volcano.
Volcanic rock with little seedling growth.After I thought my legs were going to give in we finally stopped standing around and hiked through more forest and down steep and eroded steps to the waterfall. I wished I was wearing Tevas so that I could hop into the water like some of the other people, but the spray was nice, though it made a lot of our pictures blurry. We didn't have much time to play because we spent too much time taking pictures and the guide had to come down and call us back to the group.
Bug that landed on Andriy's lens.
Steps to the waterfall.
Waterfall.We walked over another hanging bridge and through an area that looked like it came out of a campground in northeastern US because it was full of pine trees and pine needles. I don't remember why they were there, but Eduardo said that they had been implanted there for some reason and now nobody likes them but they're still there. Then they took us on a tractor ride all the way back to the reception area.
Tractor ride.
Scenery from the tractor.VENADO CAVERNS MIXUP
After the hike we got changed and headed into La Fortuna to meet for our adventure tour into the Venado Caverns. We had booked the tour with Desafio, so even though the tour was at 2pm, I figured we should head out earlier to make sure that we could find the meeting place and make sure everything was okay.
While we were on the main road, we saw a bunch of animals being fed out of the window of some stupid tourist car. I sort of look down upon people feeding wild animals, but I had to admit I was glad they did it so that I had the opportunity to stop and take pictures. Some guy on the road told me that the animals were called "pizotes," which I later found out were actually coatimundis, and they're actually so much like raccoons that I kind of feel like they're supposed to be eating trash anyway...
Roadside coatimundis.
So cute.So, foreshadowing. Earlier in the day I wasn't sure if the tour was at 1pm or 2pm, and I looked on my reservation sheet and noticed that I hadn't specified the time. I sort of had a subconscious thought of, "That's weird," but I didn't think much of it (I really should have). When we got to the Desafio offices, we told the guy we were there for the afternoon tour and just wanted get everything in order. The guy asked these girls to look us up, and then they started speaking in Spanish. I heard some snippets that included the word "mañana," and I got this horrible feeling that something must be wrong. The guy then told us that we were supposed to go in the morning, and they were waiting for us in the morning wondering where we were.
I got really scare that I never actually specified which tour we were going on, although I really though that I had mentioned it in one of my emails. So my first instinct was to go online and find the email to show them. I cursed myself a little for not printing it out, and cursed myself a little more when their internet wasn't working. The stupid thing was that it worked on one of the two computers, but the computer that it worked on had a really really dim monitor. Eventually we asked them if we could switch the monitors, and they were like, "Okay, if you know how to do it..." I finally got on my email only to discover that I couldn't find the email I sent because my mac doesn't save the outgoing mail on the server.
I started to freak out a bit because I had already paid for the tour (and it had already been charged on my credit card), and I didn't want them to tell us that it was our fault for not showing up and that we wouldn't get a refund. The guy said their reservations guy was out to lunch, so I'd have to wait until he came back to discuss. Normally I wouldn't have been so anxious, except that I knew that it was highly possible we were partly to blame, and I had no way to prove otherwise. Luckily, I must've looked so distressed that one of the girls came over and told us that we could join the tour the next morning. We were supposed to leave for Monteverde the next morning, but the only thing I had planned for that day was to relax once we got there, so we did have some amount of flexibility. I was really glad that I built that extra time in for emergencies like this.
In the end the reservations guy Greg came back, and we came to the conclusion that I must've hinted that I wanted to go in the afternoon in my very original email, which was over a month before I filled out the reservation form, and he must not have connected the two. Though, to be fair to me, he should have asked me when I didn't specify. Part of what really messed us up was that he sent me a confirmation form which I told him I wasn't able to view in my pdf viewer, and after he sent it again twice with no results I just gave up and figured everything would be alright. Lesson learned: don't ever assume that you don't need the reservation confirmation!
Since we now had a free afternoon, we decided to go to the Fortuna Waterfall (which was actually on my original plan, except that the morning hike took longer than I thought it would). Greg was really nice and gave us good directions and recommended the place down street next to Burger King for lunch. I wasn't feeling too hungry so I got a delicious Costa Rican ceviche (even better than Peruvian ceviche!) with a watermelon smoothie, and Andriy got some chicken.
Delicious Costa Rican ceviche.
Toucan decoration made from a tire.FORTUNA WATERFALL
The Fortuna waterfall was very close to town but, again, at the end of a long dirt road. I think it was my favorite waterfall all trip (even though it cost $7 per person to get in), mostly because of this amazing prehistoric vista that we saw when we entered. Seriously, I don't know how this giant hole appeared in the earth and got so green with vegetation, but it looks like I could enter and find dinosaurs from The Land Before Time.
Fortuna Waterfall
(click on the picture to see the larger view, you don't really get the whole magnificence from this little thumbnail...)
(click on the picture to see the larger view, you don't really get the whole magnificence from this little thumbnail...)
In Fodors they say that the waterfall "requires a strenuous walk down 1/4 mi of precipitous steps," and all I kept thinking about while I was climbing (yes, climbing) was "precipitous steps." I was reminded of when we were in Caracol in Belize, which are these Mayan ruins where the steps are like each over a foot tall, and I had to sit on my butt and climb down one step at a time. That always also reminds me of in Spirited Away, when the little girl is going down these really steep steps, trips, and just starts running down and runs into the wall at the end (which is hilarious btw). So these steps weren't quite as bad, but I still kept wanting to hold onto the guardrail just in case. The hardest part was that some of the dirt steps were also wet, so I was afraid to slip. Andriy tried to teach me Armin-style toe-heel footwork to maintain better control, but I wasn't a very good student.
When we got down there it was a bit chilly, considering we were at the bottom of this giant ditch that didn't get that much sunlight. Still, it was warm enough to shiver a little and go swimming. I was a little bit afraid to go too close to the falls because Greg warned us it might be dangerous, but there were plenty of people swimming around in it, so I managed to get partway in while staying near the rocks. I also wanted to walk around to the cave behind the waterfall where I saw some other people, but the path was a bit slippery and I didn't want to risk it.
Me and the waterfall.While I was playing around in the water, Andriy was sitting on the rocks sort of awkwardly, complaining that he couldn't go in yet because he ate too much and was feeling too out of shape from climbing down all the stairs. Then he threw up in a bag. A lot. It kind of looked like those bags of beef noodle soup that they give you in Taiwan, except that it was red and looked more like borscht. I don't really know what happened, it didn't seem to be anything bad with the food except that maybe he ate too much and the constant winding steps might have given him some nausea. Or maybe it was an adjustment to climate, which happens to me sometimes. He felt okay enough to hop in the water a little, but then it went on and off a bit for the rest of the day.
Andriy swimming.After we'd experienced the waterfall, we walked around the corner to a swimming hole river area where I tried to take some pictures of fish with my underwater camera (didn't really work though, they were too fast). Then all the other tourists showed up and we decided to climb all the way back up and head to the hot springs. We stopped at a supermarket on our way back and got chips and Ramen (and the guy blatantly gave me the wrong change, but I didn't feel like going back to argue since it was only a few cents) and also filled up some gas.
Swimming hole.BALDI HOT SPRINGS
I read this other girl's blog online about Tabacon Hot Springs saying it was the most amazing paradise ever. She said that she went to Baldi Hot Springs afterwards and thought it was so tacky in comparison. Then she met another traveler later on that was talking about these hots springs that were so amazing, and it turned out the other traveler was talking about Baldi, and the girl scoffed and thought that the other traveler had no idea what she was missing.
At the front desk of Arenal Observatory Lodge, the guy had enumerated a bunch of hot springs options for us. Tabacon was $70, Baldi was $21 (would have been $25 but the hotel gets a discount). Yeah, so obviously we chose to go to Baldi... I had asked about the night pass, but the hotel guy said it was $60, though now I know that that is only if you want the buffet dinner (it's only $45 without). Olga had mentioned that she went to some free hot springs that locals go to, but we didn't really ask about it, and I kind of wanted to see some of the fancier stuff anyway.
When we first entered Baldi, I thought that the girl from the blog must've been crazy because it really was like paradise, and I couldn't imagine Tabacon being much better. There were tropical plants everywhere and tons of different hot springs of different temperatures scattered all across the grounds. You even have to walk up the trail through some leafy tunnels past the giant water slide and helicopter pad to get to some of them. We were there around 5pm, so I brought my camera around with me to take pictures before the sun set. We walked all around to discover all of the nooks and crannies, and then we went back to the locker to lock our stuff up (in retrospect, we could have probably saved the $5 and locked it back in the car).
Swim-up bar.
Ling and Andriy at the hot springs.
Shower?
Exotic scenery.
More exotic scenery.
Water slide.Then it got dark and we resigned ourselves to just relaxing in the pools. We soaked in really hot and then medium hot pools, I got a couple of great waterfall massages, we competed for how long we could hold our breath underwater (my new technique is to fall asleep), and we sat near the swim-up bar without paying $10 for drinks. My favorite part was when it started to rain, but it was really peaceful because we were already in the hot springs, so the rain was soft and cooled us off a little bit.
In the end, I started to see what the blog girl was talking about, because I noticed that some tiles were missing from some pools, and it did have a bit of a plasticky feel to it. Also, they had this ridiculous disco ball overhanging one of the bigger pools (that was stupid because there weren't many lights to illuminate it anyway), and they blasted party music on speakers. I mean, I didn't really mind because I liked singing along, and the thermal waters themselves were still really nice, but I could just see how some people might hate it. Probably if I went back to Arenal I would try out Tabacon, just to see what the fuss is about, but I think that Baldi was just fine for us.
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