Costa Rica 2008 - Day 2 - Alajuela to La Fortuna

ROAD TO POAS VOLCANO

La Garita to Poas Volcano.

When we woke in the morning, Cinthya served us a really delicious breakfast. It was weird, though, because I was expecting to just kind of sit down with the family, and instead she gave us each a menu and made our specific orders for us while we sat there, which was again super awkward and made me really feel like I should get up and help her wash the dishes. I got this London omlette or something like that, which was eggs with ham and cheese and tomatoes on top and really tasty. There was also coffee and orange juice, but I didn't finish my coffee because I was anxious to get on the road.

We wanted to get going by 7am because the volcano opened at 8:30am, but we didn't make it out until 8am (I was just glad we weren't with Serghei and Willa - then it might've been noon before we headed out =P). Somehow I convinced myself that we were close enough that it would only take 30 minutes, but it ended up taking an hour and a half to drive up the mountain. I think part of the problem was that Cinthya gave us a vaguely labeled map, and even though there were signs for the volcano along the way, they occasionally contradicted themselves or disappeared. I think we ended up making a roundabout loop, because the problem was that there were multiple ways to get up the mountain, and all the little villages look the same. Even now I'm not entirely sure which way we went on the map.

Andriy was driving, which was good on the one hand because I wasn't used to driving on mountains without railings, but bad because I always make fun of him for being such a n00b at driving (like Steph Wang, he can actually count how many times he's been behind the wheel...) so I kept getting scared that he would mess up a turn and drive off the side. Fortunately, it went pretty smoothly and gave me ample opportunity to take roadside pictures of cows and coffee farms.

Cows.

Valley.

CRATER LAKE AND BOTOS LAGOON

So Poas Volcano is not active, but it has this steaming crater lake that steams sulphurous gases and occasionally erupts like a geyser. Actually, when I was near it I could smell the sulfur, and I sort of imagined that my nasal passages were burning up just a little. When we got in the park, we spent some time walking around the visitor's center, then hiked a very short road to the crater. On the way there were these giant leaf plants (sombrilla del pobre, aka "poor man's umbrella") that you could just stand under (too bad it didn't rain so that we could test it out). They also had these weird phallic growths around the base, I suppose they were leaves that hadn't yet opened or something, but they were disturbing...

Sombrillas del pobre.

There were already a whole bunch of tourists looking at the crater by the time we got there around 10am, but it was nowhere near as bad as places like Niagara Falls or Grand Canyon. When we first walked up to the railing the crater was totally covered in cloud. They warn you to get there early for the best chances at clear viewing, and I was really scared that we were already too late. The fog made for some nice pictures itself though, and luckily the clouds passed in a few minutes, and we were able to get in some nice shots of the crater itself. They even had an elevated viewing platform that we used to take pictures of each other from above.

Andriy trying to take crater pictures.

Me and the crater.

The crater.

Then we walked a minor trail to reach the Botos Lagoon, which is an extinct crater that has since been filled in to form a cold but slightly acidic lake. It was also on-and-off shrouded in clouds, so we waited there for a while listening to this American woman talk to her Costa Rican friend/boyfriend/tour guide about how Bush is a criminal. We speculated but never quite figured out their relationship because he talked a bit about how he guides tours of people from all nationalities, but the way they talked was more personal than tour guide and customer, and then they asked us to take a picture together for them. I guessed that maybe she was on some sort of exchange program and was staying for an extended period of time with some Costa Rican acquaintances. The woman wondered out loud if you could swim in the lake, and I started up a conversation with her by telling her probably not, considering it's acidic and all.

Botos Lagoon.

...shrouded in cloud and mystery.

DOKA ESTATE COFFEE PLANTATION

The trail back from the lagoon was kind of long and relatively uninteresting, and it was noon before we got back, even though we were supposed to go on the 11am coffee tour. Despite all of the signs that we saw on our way up pointing to the coffee plantation, it was still really difficult to find. I think the thing that threw us off the most was passing a sign saying it was 3km away, shortly followed by a sign that said it was 25 km away. I think it's the alternate routes again that were causing this confusion, but we finally saw what we thought was the right road, even though it was a sketchy dirt road behind some little elementary school. I tested out my Spanish again with some school mom waiting in her car, this time with better results, and then again a little bit down the road with some random school kid. I love when the people don't speak English because, even though it's frightening, you don't feel quite as stupid because there's no other choice. The school kid had never heard of the place by name, which I thought was really odd considering he lived basically right there, but once I got across that we were looking for the coffee plantation he knew where it was (I didn't know how to say plantation, so I just said "la plantacion del cafe," but I guess the actual word is "el cafetal"... though "plantacion" does actually mean plantation, so I don't know).

Finally we got into the actual estate, and we encountered our first non-paved road of Costa Rica. It was okay though, the gravel was relatively consistent if you just drove somewhat slowly. There were fields of coffee bushes along the way too, which were pretty. The only pain was the dog that kept barking and chasing the car such that we had to drive slowly to avoid hitting it. I don't know why Costa Rican dogs are so dumb, because this happened multiple times to us later in the trip, and it's like, seriously, if we just decided we didn't care, those dogs would be so dead.

Road into the plantation.

So in my correspondences with the coffee guy, he told me, "If you get late do not worry we will still do the tour for the two of you." He said, "We have three tour guides at your service, I meant that you do not have to worry because we can have something in between, and you don't have to pay any extras for that." He also said we could take the special buffet lunch tour for $21 per person. Well, I should have printed out this correspondence because the guy at the desk said that we'd have to pay the regular tour price of $16 plus $8 for lunch, and we'd have to wait for the next tour at 1:30pm. He said that they only had one tour guide at the time, and he couldn't check the computer because it was down, and the manager was out for the day. It was only $3 more per person, but it was still annoying, not to mention that he called me "lady" when addressing me (I don't know if this is a Costa Rican thing, that they don't know it sounds really rude, because it happened again later in the week as well). I suspect that we couldn't get the lunch special because our timing wasn't right and they didn't have the buffet lunch out anymore, but I still think the way he acted like he had no idea what I was talking about is bull (esp since it's on the website... bastard). The worst part was that we weren't about to just leave and forget the tour because we already planned it, so we just sucked it up and paid.

Despite the annoying guy at the desk, the tour guide was really nice. Tt was this older man who wore a typical gaucho outfit and liked to say "crap" a lot. He came around and told the kitchen staff to set up lunch for us (which was delicious and featured eight different coffee blends and a delicious blackberry milkshake), and then he came to get us before the tour started. There was only Andriy and me and this German family there for the tour. The mom didn't speak English, so the girl had to stop and translate everything while the guide waited. I liked hearing the German though, so I didn't mind the extra wait.

Lots of different types of coffee.

Lunch at the plantation.

The tour is supposedly best during the picking season (Nov-Jan), where you get to pick your own coffee beans and see the beans being processed. It was sort of dark and rainy when we were there, and we only got to see the plants and the machinery, but none of it was functioning because there were no beans to process.

We started off with some coffee history. Coffee originally came from Ethiopia, and it didn't come to the Americas until relatively recently, which is surprising because we associate coffee growing with a lot of South and Central America. We stood in the field where the guide showed us the seedlings that they had planted. You always have to plant two coffee beans together because they are hermaphrodites and you can't tell which one will become the female (at least as far as I understood, but I was sort of taking lots of pictures so I tended to zone in and out of the explanations sometimes).

Apparently coffee flowers and then replaces the flowers with ripened fruit (the beans) three times a year in November, December, and January, so the pickers come and have work for three months in the year and siesta for another six. I think the other three months they clean the grounds, but this was never quite clear because the guide was so intent on his joke about Costa Ricans wanting to party for six months that he didn't seem to understand when we asked multiple times what they do in the other three months (the German guy whispered to us, "I don't know about you, but we have twelve months in the year in Germany). So anyway, you see three different sizes of fruit on each branch, and I guess the pickers have to know which ones to pick. They make a dollar per basket of beans that they pick, which is something like $35 a day, and they save up as much as they can for those three months. The plants also have to alternate years because after being picked, a coffee plant needs a year to rest and recover.

Baby coffee plant.

Adult coffee beans.

A cool fact was that there were lots of banana trees planted sporadically amongst the coffee, and the guide said it wasn't just so they could have bananas to eat (he said bananas are crap that nobody cares about). The banana plants are taller than the coffee, so they help break the wind and protect the coffee during storms. The banana plants also absorb and hold a lot of a lot of water, so when dry season comes, the coffee plants are able to absorb some of the water back from the roots of the banana plant. The guide cut a branch from the banana plant with his machete (the way he hacked he must've really thought they were crap) and squeezed out all the water for us to see.

Our tour guide hacking the banana plant with a machete.

How much water the banana plant holds.

The coffee beans then go through the processing area where they are separated by size and quality, peeled, lose sugar, and left to dry. First they are dumped into this giant vat that is filled with water, and the good beans sink to the bottom while the bad beans are not dense enough and float to the top where they are carried away to become fertilizer. Then some weird suction from this pipe in the middle causes all of the good beans to be sucked up and transported to the peeling station. In the peeling station they have these rotating grates that are sized so that the little beans are separated in the first round, the medium in the second, then the large in the third. The grates also kind of smush the beans a little so that their skin comes off. Then the beans are left in these sink-like areas until they lose some percentage of their sugar and water weight. After that people bring them outside to what looks like a mini basketball court and rake them flat like Zen gardens to dry in the sun.

I understood most of the process from the tour guide, but then he also showed us an informative video of the same thing, which was actually good because it showed us the actual action that we couldn't see because it was not picking season. The only thing we wondered was if the people wore special "bean-drying-area-only" shoes while they walked back and forth raking the beans in the sun. I wouldn't want to drink coffee that people stepped on with shoes that they stepped in poop with...

Andriy and the German people where the water separates the good and bad beans.

Coffee peeling machinery.

Finally we went to the roasting center, which was not very interesting except that they had this pretty display of coffee bags and their associated pre-roasted beans. Then they gave us chocolate covered coffee beans that were quite tasty and led us into the gift shop where we inevitably bought two bags of coffee (even though I knew I could get it cheaper in a Costa Rican supermarket).

Roasters.

Buying some coffee.

ROAD TO LA FORTUNA

Poas Volcano to La Fortuna.

By the time we finished the tour it was already past 3:30pm and raining. It was going to take us approximately 3 hours to get to La Fortuna and the sun set at 6pm, so we were running a high risk of driving in the dark, which we had been trying to avoid. We asked the tour guide for directions, and he basically gave us this look of dismay and told us not to go all the way to La Fortuna if we could help it. We already had a two night stay booked at the Arenal Observatory Lodge, so there wasn't much we could do about it. I was anxious to get over there anyway, so I didn't really mind driving a little bit in the dark.

Turns out that the road to La Fortuna was one of the nicest roads I've ever seen. We asked about it later at the front desk when we arrived, and we found out that the road was actually newly paved this summer, which is probably why the tour guide thought it was horrible and dangerous. Even though it was only one lane on either side, there was a double yellow line and reflectors on both sides, making it quite safe and pleasant to drive on. We made great time to La Fortuna and got there just a little after 6pm. There were also beautiful mountains all along the way with some roadside waterfalls.

Beautiful scenery.

Long one-way bridge.

Nice paved road with reflectors.

It was only after driving past La Fortuna that it got a bit rough. So far we hadn't encountered any non-paved roads, and we figured everyone was lying about how driving in Costa Rica was so bad. Let's just say that we only had to drive 9km to get from the main road to the lodge, and it took us over half an hour. They warn you on TripAdvisor that the road into the Arenal Observatory Lodge is 9km of hell, but you never know what to expect until you've experienced it. I was driving, and at first I tried to dodge the potholes, but after a while you start to realize that there is no way to dodge them because they are basically organized in layers like bricks, perfectly aligned so there aren't gaps in between that you can hide in. It became funny after a while, because our car was just jumping up and down, and for some strange reason this gave me an indescribable urge to make scat-like noises like "boo boop be doo wop" (I sounded like Ed from Cowboy Bebop).

At some point we saw lots of people gathered around looking at the volcano (these people took a nighttime tour and paid money to come all the way out here where we were staying just to see the volcanic flow), and soon after I basically had to drive through a mini-river. Since it was dark I thought I was driving into a lake, but luckily I came out and there was magically a road road on the other side. I chastised Arenal Observatory Lodge for not paving their roads, but it turns out that section is outside of the lodge premises, and we reencountered a semi-paved area after we got inside the gate. At the gate the guard asked what room number we were, and when I told him we hadn't checked in yet, he took a while looking us up, and I got really paranoid that we weren't on the list, even though I'd already called twice to reconfirm.

Road inside Arenal Observatory Lodge.

ARENAL OBSERVATORY LODGE

We checked into our place in La Casona, which was this cabin a couple hundred meters from the main hotel area. It had a shared bathroom for five rooms, but really there were two bathrooms that were pretty large and were separated from the shared sink area by locked doors and a changing area. When I called a month ago to reserve rooms, they already didn't have any volcano-view standard rooms, so this was basically the only choice that we had if we wanted to see the volcano in our sleep (which turned out to be worth it as I'll explain later). It only cost about $60 a night + tax (someone described La Casona online as "getting all the amenities of the rich people for half the price"), the rooms were nice, free yummy breakfast, lovely pool and jacuzzi, and free guided tour of the grounds in the morning. Not to mention that this was one of the only hotels on the active side of the volcano, aka the side where you could see the eruptions, and we were the closest at about a mile away. All day long you hear the volcano rumbling, and it sounds like thunder (someone described it online as "the earth breathing"). I would say that for the price, it was definitely worth it staying there rather than one of the many many cheap hotels with a nice view on the inactive side of the volcano.

Here are some pictures of the place I took before we checked-out:

La Casona.

Inside.

Our room.

Chairs in the room set up for sitting and viewing the volcano.

View from the window.

View of the lake from the porch.

So the guy who checked us in was really weird. He talked sooo much about the weirdest things, like he was asking about my name and explained to us the whole history of Spanish last names, that the Lopez are people who worked for Lope or something like that. Regardless, he was funny and really enumerated all of the options available to us for things to do, even though we already had most of the stuff planned.

We put our luggage in the room, then went to the restaurant for dinner. I knew it would be marginally expensive, but we obviously didn't want to venture out through the 9km dirt road again, so we had to accept it. I got a sirloin steak, which I assumed was going to be fancy because it's always the really soft juicy stuff in the US, but it turned out to be almost hamburger like, which was weird. I guess wikipedia is telling me the stuff I was thinking about was top sirloin. Andriy also got a sirloin, but his had bacon on it and he really liked it. I think the highlight of dinner, though, was the delicious passionfruit juice for $1, of which I had two.

After dinner we got our bathing suits and went to the pool. It was a little cold to be in the pool, so we just sat in the giant 12-person jacuzzi. There was like nobody there except for at the end, when a family of four came and joined us. The privacy was nice, especially considering how obvious it was from dinner that the hotel was full of American tourists. We were there for about two hours before crashing for the night.