April Cycles Central America: La Fortuna and Volcan Arenal

Arenal Lake

Volcan Arenal

We had three days off from biking for our side trip to La Fortuna. We had originally planned on 2, but it took much longer to get there than we expected it to, so we had a travel day to get there, one full day then another travel day back.

From Cañas we had a 1 hour bus ride to Tilaran, this put us up in the mountains. We had a two hour layover there, in which we found a bakery to hang around in. From there it was a 2 hour ride around Lake Arenal to get to La Fortuna. The ride around the lake was spectacular. I wish we could have gotten out and enjoyed it more. I couldn´t believe how gorgeous it was, don´t know if I´ve seen anything prettier the whole trip. I spent the two hour bus ride trying to take pictures, but it was really difficult. Didn´t get many good ones. As for tourism around the lake there isn´t a whole lot to do on the lake, there aren´t public beaches, just private resorts. There are a lot of wind surfing resorts, as Lake Arenal is considered to be in the top 3 for worldwide windsurfing destinations. This is so because of the consistant winds through here (which we´ve been dealing with on our bikes!). I would love to come back with a rental car some day and really enjoy the drive and perhaps learn to wind surf!

La Fortuna was about another 20 km beyond the lake. It was a really cute small town, views of the volcano from anywhere in town. We stayed at Gringo Petes. A hostel run by an american. And it was really cheap, only $5 per person for the dorms, this is by far the cheapest we have found in Costa Rica. They had a kitchen there, so we were able to cook all of our own meals. We also had the best hot water shower of the whole trip (good temp and water pressure)! Hot water is a luxury and 99% of places don´t have it, so we´ve gotten used to freezing showers! It will be strange to go home and have the option of hot or cold. I try to tell myself I will do cold, but thats really hard to do when you have a choice! Cold water improves your circulation and is better for the environment!

On our full day off we did an all day tour in order to be able to get a lot done on our limited time schedule. It was a little annoying that the day we chose to do the tour is was foggy and raining. It ended up being just me and Craig and two guides! It was kinda weird. We did a tour around the gardens of the Arenal Observatory where we looked at medicinal plants, which I really enjoyed. We also saw a water fall and a family of Coati in the trees nearby. One of our guides seemed drunkish and pocketed some psychedelic mushrooms we found growing in cow poo along the way! He was quite entertaining. We did a hike up to Cerro Chato, which was very steep and muddy. It is a smaller volcano at the base of Arenal, and I would imagine on a nice day would have awesome views of the volcano. The trail up was so steep, I could compare it to doing lunges upstairs, for over an hour, and going down was just as bad if not worse, cause we took a longer way down. I occasionally has to use my arms to pull myself up some of the steps. The hike was through cloud forest and it was incredibly beautiful, I wanted to take pictures every 2 steps. At the top we were rewarded with a crater lake for swimming in. The water was freezing but felt good. When we first got there it was so foggy you couldn´t see more than a few feet ahead, so that made it fun for swimming. By the time we left we could see across.

After the hike we had lunch with our guides, took a little break and went for another hike. My legs were shaking from exhaustion at this point, so luckily the second hike was easy. It was up a lava flow from a previous eruption of the volcano. It was like a dry river bed, and pretty neat to see, full of volcanic rock and ash like sand. All of the tourism photos you see of the area are pictures of the volcano erupting at night, red lava spewing everywhere. So we were really hoping to see that on the evening hike, but apparenly there has been no such activity since 2009! Guess we should have done better research, haha! I was here in 2003 when it was still having nightly eruptions, but I couldn´t be bothered to get out of bed in the night to see it. :(

Once all the hiking was done we went to some free hotsprings. There are a couple of hot spring resorts here, the most expensive one costs about $85 to get in! I went there in 2003 when it was about $15 to get in, it´s a really neat place, waterfalls, waterslides, swim up bar, buffet, but not worth $85! So our guides took us to the free local spot, which is basically the run off from the very expensive Tabacon Hot Springs. I don´t have any pictures since it was already dark when we got there. It was so nice though. We stopped at a bridge over the road and underneath ran the thermal water river, there was a small waterfall created from the concrete slab under the bridge. Water was the perfect temperature and our guides made us drinks from the local brand of sugar cane rum, and there were lots of fireflys in the air! The water running under the bridge created a waterslide effect, and we were able to lay down and be pushed to the other side where the water fall was. This part is hard to describe, but everything about the experience was awesome. All in all it was a fantastic day. By the end the weather cleared and we were able to see the volcano again and the rain stopped.

The next day getting back was an ordeal. We misread the bus schedule and missed the first bus back to Tilaran, it was at 8:30 and not 9:30 like we thought. The next one was not til 5:30pm, which was when the last bus from Tilaran left for Cañas. So we had to figure out another option. We were about to board a 9:30 bus headed toward San Jose, when Craig realized he forgot something at the hostel and had to go back! So we missed that bus and couldn´t get another one til 12:45! I was sooo annoyed. We ended up take the 12:45 bus all the way to San Jose, which took 6 hours because of traffic getting into the city! And then another 4 hour bus ride from San Jose to Cañas. We had about 10 minutes in between buses. And I didn´t get to pee, so I had to stoop to the level of peeing in a water bottle on the second bus! It was ridiculous! We arrived to our hotel well after 10, tired, hungry and dehydrated! I was not happy. There probably was some better way to get there that we didn´t know about but oh well, we made it. My whole body was pretty much disabled from the hike the previous day as well!