Saturday, March 29, 2014

The three of us awoke at precisely 8:00 and headed to town to find some breakfast.  We ate at this small coffee shop that served breakfast.  I enjoyed some pancakes and orange juice while the two girls enjoyed cups of vanilla tea and eggs.  After that, we went further into town and actually did the souvenir shopping and purchasing of gifts for friends and family.  We also purchased our bus tickets for the next day and enjoyed a very cool view of the Catholic Church in the middle of the town with the volcano in the background.  After returning to the hostel, Katie hung back and relaxed for a little bit while McCall and I got a taxi to take us to the waterfall close by.  After paying our $10 admission, we climbed down the 480 stairs to get to the waterfall.  I didn’t actually count them, but I trust the person who told us that statistic.  Despite feeling some fatigue in my legs, we enjoyed the green journey on the way down.  When we finally got to the bottom, the waterfall was absolutely worth it.  It was probably 50-75 feet tall and just plain magnificent.  The water came down in a thunderous roar that filled the almost enclosed valley.  The mist from the water’s impact reached further than Shamoo’s Splash Zone at Sea World.  McCall got in the little pool of water while I enjoyed the beauty from a relatively safe distance (mostly, I didn’t want to hike in my swimsuit).  When the beauty of the waterfall became such that we could not take it anymore, we made the 480 stair trek back up to the summit.  After that, I took a nap in the hammock, and I didn’t even feel lazy or bad about it.  It was justified hammock time.  For our afternoon adventure, we had a hike/ hot-springs combo closer to the actual volcano.  We had a guide named Jesús who was quite a character.  We admired the different ridges of Arenal, learning that it was inactive for thousands of years until 1968 when it erupted and killed 83 people.  With the eruption, the landform changed completely, creating ridges and crests where rocks had spewed out from the top.  In my non-scientist way of explaining this, Volcan Arenal did not spew out lava from the top like you think of from the Super Mario 64 video game volcanoes.  Instead, it would spit out really hot rocks.  Unfortunately (for the tourist, and maybe for the residents), the volcano has been dormant since 2010.  The first part of our hike consisted of Jesús showing us cool views of the volcano and other things surrounding us such as this cool lagoon just underneath us.  After showing us a colony of ants carrying leaves to their momma ant, and explaining to us that the area that we were looking at used to be flat farmland, but is now rock rainforest, Jesús started us on the hike.  We saw some toucans, which apparently they call corrers here because the sound that toucans make sounds like someone saying the Spanish word “correr” (I had no idea that’s what sound a toucan makes).  We also found some wild guayaba that Jesús picked off of a tree for us.  They were quite delicious pieces of fruit.  I felt like a wild monkey, picking wild fruit from the tree and eating it.  We continued on through the rain forest and learned all kinds of things about plants and birds and rocks and things that I probably haven’t heard since like 8^th grade science class (ok, that’s probably an exaggeration, I do have a Geography minor and we talk about this kind of stuff in the science-y geography classes).  We even saw a couple of wild monkeys in the rain forest.  Jesús told us to be careful of the monkeys because they might throw their feces at us.  How rude of the monkeys.  At the conclusion of our hike, we waited for an hour or so as our driver came back to pick us up and take us to Baldi Hot Springs.  This place was a huge resort type place with 26 hot springs pools and other things that resorts have such as restaurants and whatnot.  After a buffet, we checked out the hot springs.  The first one we went to was just not quite warm enough for our tastes, so we went to another one.  This one felt amazing at first because it was hot tub and a half hot, but after a while it was too warm for us, so we went to yet another one.  The last one was just right.  It was the perfect temperature to just relax in.  It even had a cool pool that was 20 degree Celsius (68 F) to help out on those tired muscles before you put them back into the warm pool.  After our Goldilocks and the Three Bears story of finding the best hot springs pool concluded, we caught the shuttle back to the hostel to enjoy the rest of the night there.  At about 10:00, they lit candles and put them in paper bags before killing all of the electricity at the hostel so that we could see the stars and probably to keep the electricity bill down.  After a little bit of that, I took the dark area as my cue to hit the sack.  I listened to a McCall and Katie verses the bugs episode, but I was on the top bunk and already half asleep.  My last memory of the night was someone yelling “Die bug, die.”