Arenal (Costa Rica)

Ola all!

How lucky are we to meet with good friends while travelling? We had to stop misbehaving as Nacho, Rosanna and Monty joined us for our for the next stage. Or maybe I should say we started misbehaving under their malevolent influence... Hum...


It's aparently rude for taxi drivers around Central America not to bombard freshly-arrived-visibly-confused-tourists with shouts of "-Taxi amigo?". It reminds me of that bubble blowing fishing tactic that dolphins use to suround schools of fish and confuse them. Try ignoring the taxi driver and they move on to shouting a string of possible locations in hope it will snape you out of your momentaneous disorientation and into the cab, without having time to consider your options. Here's and example of a tipical conversation:

Driver: Taxi amigo?

You: No, gracias.

D: Taxi, taxi amigo?

Y: No gracias.

D: San Jose, Tortuguero, Tamarindo, Arenal, Monteverde, Alajuela amigo?

Y: AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! ***** ******

So, when we picked up Nacho from the San Jose airport we obviously stalked him for a bit muttering "Taxi, amigo?!"

On the next day we travelled to La Fortuna, a now incredibly touristy village at the base of Volcano Arenal. The attraction is that the volcano is still active and we thought it was about time we tried our luck again (I'm joking, Mum and Annie, it was a totally safe experience)! With Rosanna and Monty having arrived the previous day and scouted the place, we just had to arrive and drop our stuff at the hotel, nice! For lunch we went to a traditional restaurant where we ate lavishingly while practicing our spanish. (I'm afraid to admit that Tom's portuguese has been contaminated by two months of travelling in Central America - I'll start the detox procedure once Nacho's nefast influence returns to London). Unfortunatly, we found out too late (ie when the bill came) that the specials in that lovely restaurant were around 20 pounds each, thus using our food budget for the week in one go (i'm joking again, Mum and Annie, we were not deprived of food at any stage of this trip although Tom sometimes finds it difficult to find good pizza places)!



Our first adventure together as The New Five (but still without a dog... sigh...) was a night climb to watch Arenal spewing lava. Of course it was cloudy, this is the rainy season after all, but we still managed to see some, hum, twenty red blobs coming out of the volcano! Not the most impressive lava show but at least this one was live and not on TV. Since all our photos of it are just perfectly black, here is instead a photo of us watching the volcano (I'm sorry but that's all we've got...). After getting soaking wet on our way down, we went for a highly appreciated swim in nearby natural hot water springs (well, a dingy place under a bridge, ahh). We returned to our hotel feeling relaxed and happy... until we met other tourists that told us we could have payed less and gone to a proper spa instead! Oh well...

After being done twice we decided we had enough of La Fortuna and moved on the next day. But before we made a quick visit to this sublime waterfall. I won't describe how nice it was to swim in it as I don't want to upset you too much...

Until the next post,

Vania