Rainforest, Volcano, and Waterfall...all in one weekend.

Oh my, what a weekend!  This weekend was probably one of the busiest most fun weekends I’ve had in a long time.  It was pretty much the opposite of my past two beach weekends where I basically just sat by the ocean all weekend.  This weekend we went to Monteverde and La Fortuna (where Arenal Volcano is).  The group I travel with has changed every single weekend and has gotten smaller each weekend as well.  The group to Puerto Viejo was 12 people, to Manuel Antonio was 8, and this weekend was 6 for Monteverde and only 2 for Arenal!

The trip pretty much began on Thursday afternoon when Chelsea and I went to San Jose after class to buy the tickets.  The bus to Monteverde leaves from a bus station that we’d never used before, so we asked the policemen where to go.  They told us the directions and then said, “Este parte de la ciudad es muy feo. Ten cuidado con tus cosas.”  Which means that the part of town where the bus station is is a bad part of town and that we should be careful with our stuff.  Great.  So we started walking…We’ve always been told that San Jose is very dangerous.  I’d never really seen that side of it until Thursday.  We were literally stepping over homeless people and avoiding making eye contact with everybody.  Not going to lie, it was pretty scary….But, we got the tickets and hightailed it out of there.  

Friday morning, our bus left San Jose at 6am…. Which means that I had to leave my house by 4:45 in order to make it to the school by 5.  At 4:45 in the morning in Heredia, it’s still dark, but I’m not scared to walk at night here as much.  Heredia is so much safer than San Jose, and I’m thankful that I live here instead of there.  Anyway, by 5:30, it was full daylight, so I wasn’t in the dark for long.  Walking back to the bus station wasn’t so bad that early in the morning since everybody was asleep.  The bus ride took around six hours, and it wasn’t very fun.  The bus made about a million stops, and there were always people standing in the aisles bumping into me and leaning on me.  Ugh.  But, it was only 6 dollars, so what can you expect, really?  Anyway, we arrived in the city of Santa Elena, where Monteverde is located…because Monteverde is a mountain, not a city. :)

Our hostel was called Pension Santa Elena.  We thought we had reserved a dorm for all of us, but when we got there, the owner,  an American named “Ran”, told us that we would have to be split up… to avoid one person having to be in a room alone, 4 of the girls opted for the more expensive “private room” while Mariah and I decided to do the $6 a night dorm room.  When Ran showed us the room, I felt like I was in a hobbit hole.  There were four beds (with one set of bunk beds) and it was a very small room. Haha.  Mariah and I were told that we would be sharing the room with Alejandro and that he was a “pretty cool dude.”  Unfortunately, we never got to meet Alejandro since he went to bed after us and we left super early in the morning.  This hostel was definitely my favorite so far.  After being shown our room, Ran sat down with all of us and showed us a map of the city and recommended his favorite activities and companies. I’ve never been in a hostel that was so welcoming or accommodating before.  I would recommend it to anyone that goes there.  That afternoon, the rest of my group went zip lining, but I decided to save the money and just explore around the town. 

The town of Santa Elena is so cool.  There is a main “village” which is a triangle.  There are tons of souvenir shops, restaurants, bars, a supermarket, and everything else you could imagine.  I wandered into a little used bookstore, and, in my defense, I was looking for a book to read in Spanish.  BUT, there were hardly any since most of the people that go there speak English.  However, I did find a French book called, Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles.  I spent about an hour just reading the book in the store before buying it for two dollars.  It really made me miss speaking French, but made me realize how easy it will be to go back into French mode.  After reading that long in French, it took a couple hours to start thinking in Spanish again.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  While the others were zip lining, I also got a chance to look in the souvenir shops for a bit…The crazy thing is that I have so many of the same souvenirs already…except they say “Guatemala.”  Haha.  Really, though…the same paintings on little boxes, the dolls, the purses… everything… The only difference is that everything costs about twice as much as it would have in Guatemala.  So, I decided that I’m not going to buy many souvenirs unless it’s something I really want.

Anyway, that night, we went to this little bar/restaurant for dinner.  The owners of the hostel recommended it because it had cheap but good food.  I had a chicken quesadilla that cost about 4 dollars, and was very good.  We went to bed fairly early since we were so worn out from the bus ride that day.  

Early the next morning, I woke up around 6:30 to go do the “puentes colgantes”  (bridges in the rainforest!).  It cost 15 dollars and was so cool!  There were 8 bridges that went over the canopy of the rainforest!  The rest of the trail was through the forest.  We were literally in the middle of the jungle!  A phrase that I had not really heard much before I came here was cloud forest… And that’s what it was…It’s basically rainforest that is at such a high altitude that it’s in the clouds.  Very cool.  We didn’t really see much wildlife, though except for a couple bugs.  Meanwhile, Mariah had gone up the Santa Elena Reserve to walk around… She’s a biology major, so she’s all about the ecosystem and bugs and such.  Anyway, after we finished with the bridges, I went up to meet her since the two of us were the only two that wanted to continue on to Arenal.  The others wanted to stay in Monteverde. 

So, on Saturday, we caught a 3hr taxi-boat-taxi ride from Monteverde to Arenal.  Alternatively, the bus ride would have taken SEVEN HOURS because the roads are just gravel between the two places.  It’s crazy.  The first taxi ride was absolutely gorgeous.  We drove through so many little pueblos, and it was so cool to see the rural parts of Costa Rica since we’d mainly been in the cities and Touristy areas.  Finally, after about an hour and a half, we arrived at Lake Arenal, from where we had a perfect view of the Volcano.  This volcano is super famous for its perfect cone shape.  Also, it erupted in 1968 after 200 years of being dormant due to an earthquake and destroyed the entire city.  Until the 1990’s, there was nothing there at all.  Eventually, the city was rebuilt in order to cater to the tourists wanting to come see Arenal.  It was active until about 8 months ago, unfortunately, so I didn’t get to see any volcano action. Haha.  I am so glad I did get to see it though, because it was beautiful. 

The boat ride was about an hour across the lake, and was very enjoyable.  We were driving toward the volcano, so I took about a billion pictures. Amazingly, my camera battery lasted all weekend.  (I forgot to charge my extra battery before I left).  Anyway, when we got to the other side of the lake, we saw a sign that said, “Caution, presence of crocodiles in the lake.”  Lol.  I should have come to expect this by now.  The funny thing is that Mariah and I had just commented on how low the boat was in the water.  Once we got off the boat, we got into our second taxi to go to our hostel, “Gringo Pete’s.”  It was super cheap, and only one night, so what the heck.  The folks there definitely weren’t as nice as the ones at Pension.  They kept trying to sell us super expensive tour packages that we’d already told them we didn’t want. 

By the time we got to La Fortuna , it was already getting dark, so we decided to spend the evening walking around the city of La Fortuna…which is a pretty cute little town.  It’s very touristy, so on every block there are souvenir shops and Tour agencies.   However, we did find this homemade jewelry stand.  Mariah found a necklace she wanted, and after bartering a little for it, she handed him what is the equivalency of a 20 dollar bill.  (Here in Costa Rica, these are very difficult to break, because nobody has change…even the hostel didn’t have change…it can be pretty frustrating at times.)  Anyway, he didn’t have change, so he asked us to watch his stand while he ran to the supermarket to get change! Ahaha.  We laughed for a bit about the strangeness of the whole situation.  In the end, Mariah got her necklace, though.

            That night, we split a pizza at a soda shop and had milkshakes afterwards… We’d been craving something besides rice and beans. After that, we made our plans for the next day and then went to bed pretty early.  When we woke up, before heading to the La Fortuna Waterfall, we wandered around for a bit trying to find a bread shop for breakfast with no avail.  We decided to just run into the supermarket…(I got a banana and a few cookies.)  Afterward, we took a taxi to the entrance of the waterfall since the city of La Fortuna has no public transportation.  The taxi only cost about 5 dollars, though, and it was definitely worth it because the waterfall was absolutely incredible.

 The cost to get in was $7, and from the entrance you could see the waterfall from a pretty good distance.  The thing was that you had a “10 minute” descent to the waterfall.   The only way you could have gone down those stairs in ten minutes was if you slid down them.  They were so so so steep and slippery because of the precipitation from the waterfall.   All the way going down, I was thinking that it was going to suck coming back up.  It took about 30 minutes to get down, and I’m still amazed that I didn’t fall.  When we got to the waterfall, I was astounded.  The water at the base of the waterfall was such a beautiful turquoise color, and there was even a rainbow in the spray.  After just standing in awe for about 10 minutes, we continued town to the side of the waterfall where there is a small swimming hole and some rocks.  The fish were enormous! They were about a foot long and didn’t mind the presence of humans at all.  It was wonderful to just be able to sit there and just relax a little bit and clear my mind.  These past couple weeks in particular have been incredibly exhausting with not a moment to just sit and rest.  I sat with my feet in the water while Mariah the bio major went looking for wildlife. Haha.  She did find a little black frog!  After a couple hours, we decided to start the trek back up the mountain… It was exhausting, but oh so worth it. 

When we got back to La Fortuna, we had about an hour to kill before the bus left for San Jose.   We sat in the town square in the pavilion just eating our snacks we’d bought that morning and admiring the view of the volcano.  An older man walked up and started talking to us…He was really hard to understand because he didn’t have any teeth, but he seemed nice enough.  He seemed to be talking about how people just come to La Fortuna for a day.  He thought that people should stay longer to appreciate the city instead of leaving so quickly.  He was right.  I wish I could stay a week in every city here instead of just a weekend.  Anyway, we got back to San Jose around 5pm, speed walked through super sketch city and then made it back home to Heredia by 6.  It was a very successful trip. 

            Today was my day to recover…and boy, did I need it.  I slept until 9 and then just lay in bed for another couple hours.  When I finally made myself get out of bed,  I started working on one of my three papers due for Wednesday.  We have one over our cinema class we had last week, and one for each of the field trips we’ve taken.  Tomorrow, we’re going on our last field trip, so that will add another paper to my to-do list.  Well, I’m finally caught up on blogging even if this entry did get a little bit long winded.  Time for bed!  Goodnight, all!