Dear friends, I have suffered a most grievous loss (this line is to be delivered by a voice-over while slowly zooming in on the hand of a lady writing with a quill pen). Being a silly silly person, I left my beautiful camera (Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5 with 10x optical zoom and 9 megapixels) on the shuttle from San Jose to La Fortuna. Being an even sillier person, I believed Alonso, the receptionist at the hostel in La Fortuna, when he assured me that there was no problem, he would just call the driver and because they deal with the company all of the time; because this has happened before; because the company is super reliable; because the drivers are so honest; and because Costa Rica is a paradise upon earth, I should go ahead on my volcano tour and trip to the hot springs and my camera would be there when I returned. Hmmm.
Well, to start over, Nicole and I got up early, bade a fond farewell to our new chums, Monica and Tarah, met our Israeli roommate, had a very hurried bfast, as in: we ordered a yogurt and poured cups of the free coffee offered in the rooftop bar/restaurant, and then our shuttle arrived. We had booked a ride on the Gray Line up to La Fortuna. It cost us $35 per person and is supposed to be fast reliable door-to-door service. We ended up being in an underbooked van and spent a good hour to an hour and a half cruising around the SJ hotels while our driver tried to get more passengers. Nicole and I were holding our breath at each stop, since we each had grabbed a row of seats to ourselves and were hoping for a nap. Finally, we hit the road with plenty of space to spread out and relax.
After a short nap, we arrived at a rest stop cum tourist crap vendor and our guide, Albarro, gave us 15 minutes to use the facilities and to donate some dollars to the local economy in exchange for lovely magnets in the shape of turtles or parrots. Nice. We stocked up on water and I deeply admired the shaped leather wall sculptures that resembled cow hide full-body reliefs of beautiful women - have you all heard of Ed Gaines? One of the fun things that I´ve learned about Costa Rica is that you can spend dollars all over the country. All prices are offered either in dollars or in colones. The exchange rate varies from location to location, but everywhere I´ve been, the people are happy to accept either currency or a blend of both and they carry handy calculators to more easily show you the amount left in either currency. Very handy and it makes me wish that I had accepted the $20 that my dad tried to give me before my flight. I just didn´t think that I needed any dollars in Costa Rica. Hah!
Anyway, back to the Gray Line. We rode for another hour or so and saw some breathtaking scenery and some very charismatic cows. It was the cows that screwed me. I just thought that they were so cute. So, like any camera-happy tourist faced with an animal and a landscape, I whipped out my camera, opened a window and took two blurry photos of Costa Rican cows. Then, I proceeded to set down my camera and pick up my book. Unfortunately, the place where I set down my camera was apparently not in my backpack.
The shuttle dropped us off at Arenal Backpacker´s Resort which is at the end (volcano side) of the main road in La Fortuna. The hostel is actually a gated compound with grounds, landscaping, a bar/restaurant, a tour desk, a free internet room, and...A POOL!!!! I kid you not. A lovely pool with lounge chairs and palm trees and it is all just amazingly gorgeous. When we arrived, Alonso was super friendly and immensely helpful in setting us up with tours, even getting us booked with a tour that was less than two hours away, to go hiking; view the volcano at night; and then visit Baldi hot springs. We forked over cash and credit card numbers and trotted away to our room, thrilled to bits with our agenda.
While meeting our new roommates, Pietr (Holland) and Caroline (Ireland), and unpacking our bags, I suddenly thought, "Oh crap, where´s my camera?" At first, I almost laughed at myself for panicking, because, of course, my camera must be around somewhere. Then, I couldn't find it and I felt a wash of cold sickness start at my hairline and wash through me, settling first in my stomach and then radiating out to my extremities. By the way, it would be interesting to learn how to replicate that sensation with some sort of pharmaceutical aid. I ran down to the reception area and told Alonso that I had left my camera on the shuttle and asked him to please call the driver, who had spent the whole drive up chatting away on his cell phone. Alonso assured me that there was no problem at all, that this happened all of the time and that he would call right away. He called...busy...he called....busy...he called...no answer. At that point, it had been about 30 minutes since I had come downstairs and over an hour since we had been dropped at the hostel. Alonso told me that he thought that the company was shut down for siesta and that I should come back a little later. I was starving and our tour was leaving in an hour, so I went off to lunch with Nicole and Pietr.
We had a lovely burrito/wrap at the Lava Lounge and made a fruitless visit to the ATM, where Nicole discovered that her card wasn't working. Back at the ranch, Alonso told me that the Gray Line still wasn't answering, but that I should go ahead and go on my tour because he would continue calling and my camera would most likely be waiting for me when I got back. I was starting to have my doubts, but I went off on the tour secure in the knowledge that Alonso was doing everything that could be done and that there was no problem.
We were picked up by a shuttle and drove to the other side of Arenal Volcano. There, we were dropped off at a trailhead on private land that has great views of the volcano and that offers good wildlife sightings. Our guide, Noelia, gave us some great information about the area, and the history of the eruptions of Arenal, I guess that the last one was in 1968 and over 80 people are confirmed as having died and over 100 are missing, presumed dead and disintegrated into ash. The locals are prepared for the volcano to go off again at any time and lava continually flows partway over the crater lip, with frequent pyroclastic activity. The gases are very strong and the volcano can not be hiked without gas masks and a portable air supply. We decided to give that one a miss.
We started our hike off with a sighting of two chestnut mandibled toucans, which was fabulous! Then we stopped to watch some leaf cutter ants carrying their little leaf hats along their own trail. I had been wondering why so many plant leaves had holes in them, I mean, some of these leaves look like lace, there are so many holes; well, after seeing the shapes of the leaf sections carried by these ants, I understood the local flora much better. We later discovered that the leaves are not taken for food themselves, but are carried to a composting station upon which yummy mushrooms will sprout and grow. Our next sighting was of a rubber tree, which is also pretty cool. Noelia pulled off some rubber and we all oohed and ahhhed over how much it seems like a rubber band straight off of the tree.
The next sighting was the best, in my opinion, we actually saw three spider monkeys. They were fabulous. My personal favorite was the one who decided that the next tree branch over was a bit too far to jump, though her chum had no problem with the leap, and instead swayed the tree back and forth until it was close enough for him/her to make a short hop. I just love watching animals perform actions that are so full of knowledge within their sphere. It does make one wonder about the true level of thought that animals, particularly primates, are capable of.
The hike was far too short and we ended up in a carpark waiting for who knows what before leaving to go view the volcano. There, we met up with James (England) who had come over from Monteverde by boat and would be heading back to town with us. We talked him into joining us at Baldi and set off for the hot springs. Yippee! We had been disappointed to learn when we arrived in La Fortuna that both of the natural hot springs, Eco Termales & Tabacon were fully booked in the evenings for our entire trip, but we were able to get bookings for Baldi. At the springs, located in a large hotel complex, Nicole and I went off to have our dinner (yes, we were suckered into buying the awful, overpriced, buffet dinner - I blame the adrenaline 'cause Alonso pushed it on us after booking us on zipline and canyoning tours). It turned out that another woman on the tour, DeLisa, had also fallen for the buffet sales-pitch, and so we all sat together to consume our rice, beans, chocolate covered strawberries (???????!!!!!!!) and coffee. DeLisa actually enjoyed the meal, mostly because she hadn't eaten in 13 hours, but Nicole and I were underwhelmed. After rushing through our meal, we ignored doctors' orders and jumped into our bathing suits and into the swim-up bar. Whoohoo! Time to get this party started!
We ended up forming a group of five: yours truly, Nicole, DeLisa, James & Gabriel (French Canadian), and set off to sample the waters. We tried a number of pools, slowly making our way up the hill and to the back of the park. The most notable pools were: the super hot pool, which only Gabriel was able to enter; the waterfall pool, where we took silly-sexy photos; the perfect temperature lagoon which also had a cold pool inside it the way that Lesotho is inside South Africa; and the water slide pool. We had heard a rumor from Tarah that there were waterslides at Baldi. However, a distinct lack of advertising and/or signage convinced us that this was merely a backpackers' legend similar to the one about the tourists who wake up sans kidneys in Mexico; though a little less gruesome. Well, to our delighted surprise, this one turned out to be fact, and what a fact! Those slides were the fastest I have ever been on. I remember slides in my youth going so slowly that I would have to push off a second time halfway through the tube. Not these puppies. James, Gabriel and I scouted out the slides while Nicole and DeLisa were at the 2nd swim-up bar and were up the metal scaffolding faster than you can say, "wheeee!" At the top, I waited to see if the slide would collapse under the weight of the two gentlemen before beginning my own descent. Upon ascertaining the relative safety of the slide, I assumed the position (legs straight, back down, arms crossed) and gave myself a mighty shove, in anticipation of a slow slide. Whoops! At one point, I caught 4 feet of air and ended up shooting off the slide a foot above the water before skipping once and then sinking with my bathing suit in complete disarray. Thank goodness that the water was deep and mostly opaque.
After that, we had to change and meet up to get our ride back to the hostel. James and Gabriel were at different hostels, but they agreed to meet us in 20 minutes and head out to a local bar. By the time we got back to the hostel, Alonso was gone, and the girl at the counter knew nothing about my camera. I told her the whole story and she said that the Gray Line office was closed and that she would call in the morning. I thanked her, told her how important this was to me and headed off to Chela's with Nicole, James and Gabriel - DeLisa decided to get an early night.
Chela´s is a fantastic local roadhouse that has a tourist-Tico ratio of about 1:10. It was nice to see actual Costa Ricans in Costa Rica, crazy. We had a couple of drinks (piña coladas for me), talked about life, love and the price of cheese, and headed off to bed in love with the world.
That was our first day in Arenal.
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