Arenal volcano and Lake Arenal
We took the bus-ferry-bus route from Santa Elena to La Fortuna today. Though its advertised as jeep-boat-jeep, we were really happy to be riding in a 20 passenger mini-bus rather than on the back of a jeep.
The road to Lake Arenal starts out ok, as a rough gravel road, and then gradually gets narrower as you get closer to the end. At the end of the road is a cafe, and a rough dirt trail down to the lake. The cafe had a restroom, which was nice after a one and one half hour rough ride for two old people like us, and it was supposed to cost 200 colones. The smallest bill I had was 1000 colones, but the attendant gave me change — 700 colones which I didn’t count very carefully. I gave Enid a 500 colone coin and she told me that it only cost her the 200, but when she showed me the change she only had two 100 colone coins. So we should perhaps learn to count our change more carefully. It is very hard to distinguish the 100 and 500 colone coins as they are very similar in size and identical colors, and they are common in change.
We waited for a few minutes for our boat. Several other boats docked and either let off, or picked up passengers while we waited. When our boat did come we hauled our suitcases down the hill and on to the boat, which was quite large, maybe 40 feet long, and would hold at least 50 people (it was less than half full this morning).
Lake Arenal is quite large. It was also quite windy, so the lake had whitecaps. We were worried that our luggage, which was sitting at the front of the boat would get wet from spray, but it didn’t. The shore of the lake is quite pretty, surrounded by high green hills and pastures. We saw a couple of nice houses, probably farms, but the shores seem generally quite deserted.
We could see Mount Arenal all along the trip, and it gradually got less and less cloud covered as we got closer. However we never did see the top of the volcano, and the best view was just before the boat docked. From there it was a ride on a nice paved road into La Fortuna. We were the last stop at the Posada Inn. The young girl at the desk was not very confident of her English, but it was still a lot better than our Spanish. We got checked in just about noon, and after we ate our lunch we picked out our laundry and got some clothes washed.
We walked to the grocery store, which we had a hard time finding. We went too far, but one of the tour information shops (there seems to one selling tours every few feet) told us we’d gone too far and told us how to get there. Along the way we had stopped at one of the tour shops, then spotted some people we’d met on the bus this morning having coffee. We stopped and talked to them, and like us they were having a hard time deciding what tour to do. They told us about the place they’d asked, and said that it wasn’t pushy. So we stopped there on our way back from the grocery store and got more information.
Church in La Fortuna
One of the reasons we missed the grocery store is that there was a large church just across from the central town square park. We walked over to the church, which was open, and stopped to look inside. We assume it is Catholic, though we had a very hard time deciding if it really was, since it was quite different than other Latin American Catholic churches we’ve been in.
We had a pizza for supper. It was absolutely loaded with cheese and very good. We also had tres leches for dessert, but it was’nt nearly as good as that we had at the small soda in Samara.
After supper we came back here to the hostel and made our lunch for tomorrow. Then we tried to decide what to do tomorrow. Since Carmen, the English speaking owner was not here yet, we decided to walk back to the tour office and book a trip to Arenal Volcano tomorrow. But when we got to the office, we talked about the tour to the young clerk, and after hearing what we would be doing, decided we’d rather take our chances on another forest hike and try to spot some more animals. So we booked a tour to another set of suspension bridges for tomorrow.
When we returned from booking we met Carmen, the owner, and arranged for breakfast tomorrow morning. We have a fairly large room, the largest one we’ve had this trip. It has both a double bed and bunk beds, and is clean. We’re using the bunk beds to hold our suitcases. Since the room has no air conditioning, and open windows, we found a screw that I put into the ceiling so I can hang our mosquito net (many others have done that as well as the roof is full of screw holes). It is now just shortly after 8 pm, and it has cooled off nicely in our room.