Costa Rica Part 4 - Arenal Volcano

Here's the last set of photos from Costa Rica - it's late and I'm pretty tired, so please excuse the commentary, but I wanted to make sure that I got them out before we leave for San Diego tomorrow.  Jet setters indeed.

We found one tour agent that was happy to speak to us despite it being the Easter long weekend.  Our hotel is where the A is, and the trip was to the Arenal volcano where the volcano is drawn on the map :)  It was a long drive - about 5 hours each way.

We stopped at Lake Arenal, which is a man-made lake/dam, and took a boat trip along the lake towards the volcano.  Here it is off in the distance.  Apparently the story is that it was called Arenal Hill and no one had any idea, until one day it exploded and took out three nearby towns and farmers in the process.  Pretty scary stuff.

Getting closer...

And finally we were there!  It was an amazing view, and apparently it isn't usually this clear.  Some of the cloud at the top of steam/smoke from the volcano, and some is just clouds.   The tour guide told us that this is pretty much a perfectly shaped conal volcano - it was amazing how symmetrical it was.

This is the view from our lunch spot.  This is around the other side of the volcano - apparently the crater has moved over time so you can just see the older crater to the left of the newer one.

Close-up.

After the delicious lunch we went to see some nearby hot springs, which was pretty amusing (although we're not really hot springs kind of people).  They did have three water slides, which were awesome.  

Our tour guide told us that the pools got progressively hotter as you went towards the top of the hill on which the springs were situated.  The second pool we stuck our toes in near the bottom of the hill was so hot that we freaked out - it was uncomfortably warm.  We thought that maybe we were just being wusses and tried to  stomach it - we managed to get in and stay there for a few minutes, but it was still pretty uncomfortable.  We tried some more pools on the way to the top, and it turns out that that was the second hottest pool there - I guess there's some variation in the temperatures.  Pretty funny - we're not so weak after all!

That's it from Costa Rica - tomorrow afternoon we leave for a whirlwind weekend in San Diego with Jess and Chris.  Photos to follow!

Costa Rica Part 3 - Scenery

Lots of beautiful natural scenery to gape at, here's a few pictures.  I'll put the volcano pictures up tomorrow.

Palm tree grove on the beach.

Blue sky, blue water.

Some of the arid Pacific coast climate, from out of the window of the bus.  It reminds me of rural Australia - low withered grass and stunted trees - but there are always those mountains in the background that remind you where you are.

Not quite a natural scene, but this was looking down one of the main roads in a small town.  It could be Cairns!

Some Costa Rican cows enjoying the view over Lake Arenal, which is a man-made dam lake that stretches nearly to the volcano.  Beautiful view.

Costa Rica Part 2 - The Animals

Costa Rica is renowned for its biodiversity - we didn't get to go hiking, but I was surprised by how much we saw from bus windows and around the hotel.  

Crab wars on the beach!

This looks like an iguana to me - huge!  There were heaps of these guys just hanging around the hotel.

This is a toucan - it was actually a fair way away, so it was hard to get a good photo.  Apparently there are six different types of toucans in Costa Rica, and this is one of the less brightly colored ones that inhabit the Caribbean side of the country (we saw it from our long bus trip to the volcano).

Monkeys!  White-faced capuchins to be exact - apparently there are only 4 types of monkeys in Costa Rica, and out of the four we saw these guys and a howler monkey.  We saw this group hanging around in a tree on the beach, watching the tourists go past.  We could literally walk under their tree, but when we did...

This guy seemed pretty angry at Stephen for getting so close to his tree, and ran towards us hissing and showing his teeth.  I was worried he was going to try to claw Stephen's face off.  The tour guide later told us that you shouldn't smile at these monkeys, because showing your teeth is a sign of aggression, so that's probably why he ran towards us showing us his!

It's a little hard to see, but these are some Caimans hanging around in the lake here.  They were only babies, but I still wasn't going much closer.

Finally, a macaw, in the restaurant we had lunch at.  Noisier than a cockatoo!  

Costa Rica Part 1 - Where We Stayed

We're back!  After a whirlwind 4 days in 35+ degrees and sunny Costa Rica, we touched down in Toronto at midnight, arriving to some lovely Canadian spring weather - 7 degrees and raining.

We booked the trip in February, with very little idea of Costa Rica as a country - we just picked it from a list, not even really realising how far south it was.  It was a long way.  We learned a lot about Costa Rica while we were there - it is a really beautiful place and the people are lovely.  We always felt safe, and even the roads seemed pretty tame.  The Costa Ricans ("Ticos") we spoke to were overwhelmingly proud of their country, telling us all about the demilitarisation of the country in 1948 and the benefits of their free education and health systems.

For those of you who are, like us, not very familiar with the geography of Central America, here's where we stayed relative to the rest of the continent.

And here's where we stayed in Costa Rica - on the North Pacific coast in the Guanacaste province.

I'll split the photos up into 4 blogs over the next couple of days.  This set of photos is about the area we stayed in.

We stayed in an all-inclusive resort, which in hindsight was a bit of a bad idea.  The idea was that we'd be able to go exploring during the day, and relax on the beach and around the pool in the evenings.  It didn't really work out like that - the resort was in the middle of nowhere, so we couldn't leave without an organised tour group, and it was full of fat tourists lounging around the pool and getting drunk on free alcohol.  We did try to hire a car, but they wanted to hold a thousand dollars on our credit cards, and our bank wasn't about to let a thousand dollar transaction go through from Costa Rica.  There's always next time.  This is the view from our window.

Here's the hotel from the top of a nearby hill - you can see how isolated it is.

We had some bad luck - because it was Easter weekend, there wasn't much going on, so we spent most of Friday and Saturday wandering around the hotel and its beach, but we did manage to get out to see the Arenal Volcano on the Sunday, before leaving on the Monday.

The beach was a black sand beach - I found it really odd.  I don't think my brain could come to terms with a beach that looked like mud.  The ocean was beautiful though, and so warm - we spent hours lazing around in the shallows.

Around the beach there were a lot of dense, scrubby little trees.  It reminded me of Australia, actually.  The north-west of Costa Rica is very very dry, whereas the central part has the mountains and the rainforest.

It had been so long since we last saw flowers.

Stephen was exploring the edge of the beach - Costa Rica had a lot of spiky plants, for some reason, and our attempt to climb the hill nearest to the hotel ended up with our legs torn up and itchy (we're ok now though).  This was also the first time we'd worn shorts since leaving Beijing in October.

Vacation time!

We're heading to Guanacaste, Costa Rica for a tropical vacation over Easter.  I don't think we quite realised how tropical though...

It's currently 1 degree and alternately raining and snowing here.  Uh oh....