Well, On Friday we left for the Volcano and I have to say that I have never been absolutely terrified on a drive before. (Frightened - sure, disbelief - yes) But never heart-stopping, can't breath scared. The roads up the mountain are narrow, steep and twisty. Did I mention narrow? In the U.S. it would be considered a one lane road. Here it just means the cars would pass by the bus with two wheels hanging off the road in the mud. However, every time the bus would go around a corner, it would end up taking the entire road and would have to slow to a crawl to do so. At one point we were on a edge of a cliff with the drop on one side and the mountain on the other and this huge truck full of cows decide not to wait for us to maneuver our way around the curve and tries to slide past us. The bus driver ended up hitting the breaks and the truck did the same so we're both stuck on this hill with maybe two inches between us and the cows and neither one of us could go anywhere.
It eventually worked out but damn!
And then there were the bridges. We were lucky if they were made of concrete. We went over one plank wood bridge and the way it creaked I thought for sure that we were going down. Other ones were made of concrete but they didn't have side rails and it was raining so hard we could barely see out of the windows. I didn't find the bridges as scary as that damn cow truck but other students were squealing and hiding their faces.
Somehow we eventually made it to the Arenal Volcano and our hotel. Which was conveniently right at the bottom of the volcano.
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| Arenal Volcan Smoking up a storm! |
It was so beautiful there! And the hotel was huge. To get from the lobby to our rooms we had to take a shuttle. It was crazy!
And . . . there was probably 10 different swimming pools. A few were filled with cold water but most of them were hot!! I loved it! The first night I probably spent four hours just soaking in the heat! Of course it helped that there was a swim up bar! But one without the other would not have been as fun!
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| Really big hot tub! |
I even smoked a Cuban cigar. Just to say that I did. It was awesome. We all felt like we were in a Godfather movie! Of course it kind of ruins the image to say that we were all in bed by 11 both nights so I just won't mention that.
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| This is actually my friends hand but it looks cooler than mine. |
The next day we went to La Fortuna Catarata. Or in English, a really freaken big waterfall! And to get to this wonder of the world we had to climb down four hundred plus steps. That would have been hard even if they were all uniform and dry. But they were not. Some of these steps were concrete, some were cinderblocks with the holes filled with dirt, others were natural rocks that happened to be handy when they were building a way down, and there were even a few wood ones! Then, to add to the confusion, they were all varying heights! It would go from 4 inch gaps to 12 inch and back down to 6 inches. Some steps tilted forward while others tilted sideways. And they were all wet and slimy! It could have been considered an extreme sport just to make it down there in one piece! Most definitely worth it though!!
It was gorgeous! For awhile there I was so focused on getting these perfect pictures that I forgot to actually look at the waterfall directly instead of through the camera. Once I did though . . . . Wow!
And then we climbed back up the four hundred steps. It makes me feel like an old lady but my hips still ache from that climb!
We headed back to San Jose Sunday afternoon and on our way back we stopped in the town of La Fortuna. I ran into a coffee shop to escape the rain and bumped into a man I have YouTube stalked a hundred times.
Every time I couldn't sleep because I was freaking out about going to a foreign country I would log on to YouTube and watch this guy's videos on Costa Rica.
Thank God for this guy or I may have not slept for the entire month leading up to leaving! ^_^ It was cool to run into him but very random too. The internet truly makes the world a smaller place!
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