Costa Rica Day 5-- La Fortuna & Tabacon

I am in love with the next two days of my trip.

It's where we took this picture, that I also love.

If I were to do Costa Rica again, I would flip my entire trip to spend most of my time in near Lake Arenal and take an overnight trip out to the beach to go diving. Don't get me wrong, I love the beach. But it's just so blasted hot there and there's really nothing else to do besides go to the beach. Plus the beaches are in Guanacaste, the dry region of Costa Rica, so it's not very pretty inland. But the area around Lake Arenal was exactly what I had pictured when I thought of Costa Rica... rich, green, lush dense jungles with beautiful waterfalls and lakes. Oh, and an active volcano in the backdrop doesn't hurt either! ;)

There's tons to do there and lots of accomodations. We found this site to be the most helpful in planning our overnight stay in Arenal. The drive out to Arenal (well, technically La Fortuna) was not too far in distance, but everything takes forever because you have to drive so slow (like 50 mph max). Getting out there took almost 5 hours.

We were so excited after about 4 hours to finally see this:

Lake Arenal

So excited, in fact, that we ALL had to jump for joy!

(or jump the best we could...like Caleb did)
Burke took a sweet jumping picture down the road a bit by the volcano... wait for it...

Anyway, getting down to La Fortuna, you take this really winding and narrow road.

Luckily it's paved, but it's still a little scary to American standards. Fortunately we had a very attentive driver named Becca Wilson, who never got distracted by wildlife on the side of the road. (Don't worry, she's still a good driver, even when her fascination of animals takes over.)

Wildlife such as this turkey looking bird:

And these guys... coatis.

(Pretty sure we weren't supposed to feed them... but oh well!)

We made our way around the lake and down near the volcano, which happens to be an active volcano! And it also happens to be where Burke took that jumping picture I promised to show:

Too bad the top of the volocano is cut off a little bit. You'll see plenty more pictures as we go...

We headed straight for la catarata de la fortuna (waterfalls), down yet another high quality road.

With well marked road signs.

I love it! Gorgeous!

And some "Love the Earth" signs too!

The hike was a beautiful and easy 20 minutes down to a GORGEOUS waterfall with a couple of swimming holes around it.

The waterfall itself was pretty fierce and made a rough current, so we couldn't swim behind it. But we got in the cold water and jostled ourselves around for a little bit.

(I'm not in love with this video, but you can hear how strong the falls were.)

(We had to doggie paddling to stay above the strong currents)

(And then I had to hang on for dear life...)

Becca brought a water camera with her, so we had a good time taking some water pictures too.

Like lounging pictures...

(notice Burke's prop...)
...and, of course, our favorite, JUMPING pictures!

It was nice to relax in that cool water... it felt great on my sunburn.

I'm sure it felt good on Becca's sunburn too...

Word to the Wise:
Be diligent with your sunscreen when you're 9 degrees north of the equator!

After the waterfalls, we all needed a little alone time, so we just parked the car in el centro en La Fortuna (cerca de la iglesia catolica, por supuesto...)

and planned a meet back at the car time. I felt really safe there and had no problems walking around by myself. In fact, I enjoyed it because I went souvenior shopping and didn't feel bad taking my time because I wasn't taking up anyone else's time. I kinda scared the crap out of Becca though because I was 15 minutes late for our meeting time... the shop was trying to charge me $23 extra and I had to fight them on it in my broken spanish. (Turns out their computer code was ringing things up wrong, but I had to wait for them to sort it out for me to pay which is why I was so late). Anyway, I was safe and not kidnapped or anything. Side note: the people here are seriously so nice. You can tell that tourismo is their business and they don't want to lose it. This is a really easy Central American country to travel to.

So, by then it was close to 6pm and time to head to our reservacion para agua thermales at Tabacon! There are a few natural hotsprings the base of volcan arenal... all the water is so warm (39 degrees Celsius) and naturally heated by the lava from the volcano. So cool! And the mineral water is also really good for your skin. Tabacon itself is a 5 star resort that you can stay at or you can just pay for a 4 hour spa pass... which is what we did. $45 for 4 hours of heaven. SO worth it!

We explored the place and hopped from spring to spring to spring for 3 of our 4 hours.

Becca got some a good picture before the sun went down.

You can see how gorgeously lush and green the area is. But it was dark most of our time there.

Burke found some mud to play in...

... and a great big leaf for a picture prop.

Burke even tried some "trailblazing" up stream. He soon found that already paved pathways from pool to pool were a little more convenient! ;)

Becca and Caleb enjoyed a lover's paradise together.

And I tagged along with Burke and enjoyed some much needed R&R!

(Some of the falls there were pretty strong... this picture caught my shocked face as I struggled to keep my swim bottoms in place!)

(I call this the "Greg Smith" picture because camera captured that water molecule right in front of my right eye, causing a bit of vision impairment... ;) All in good fun, Greg...)

Three hours was plenty. After that time, we were tuckered out.

Besides, it was past 9pm and we still had to make it to our hotel and check in... and that was an adventure 15km down a dirt road! The road to our Arenal Bista Lodge (huh, I made a typo with Vista but I kinda want to leave it because I think it's funny because that's what it sounds like in Spanish!) Anyway, the dirt road was SOO rough! Huge deep potholes everywhere, totally unavoidable. Becca started out SUPER slow which was more painful. But then when she got passed by a local Honda Civic or something, she decided to follow suit. And going fast was much easier than slow. (By the way, we had a 4x4 Hyundai Tuscon... good investment for this trip).

We found the Arenal Vista Lodge no problems. It was a quaint little place with little cabinas that overlooked the darkness (at that time...). Our staff was waiting for us and they were so funny and cute and nice to us! It really helps that Becca speaks Spanish. The boys do alright, but Becca's fluency combined with her beauty and whit has really gotten us a far ways with some people. Anyway, the kitchen was already closed but they knew us gringos were hungry so they grilled us up some of the best fish I ever tasted (with garlic and butter), some rice and veggies.

Best $11/plate spent on this trip!

They even folded our napkins into swans. Or something.

After dinner, we settled in and pretty much went right to sleep... we were all beat. You'll have to wait for the next's days post to learn more about our highly recommended lodgings! :)