It's been pouring since last night. We have the river boat tour today and hopefully finishing up with a massage at the spa. More on that later as we have to get an early breakfast and get down to the tour bus.

1/6/08
N 10.50229
W 84.69499


Rain
The rain here is interesting, for the past few days we had occasional showers that would go from a drizzle to a complete downpour and back to clear in the course of about 10 minutes. It looks like there must be much bigger storms in the rainy season since everywhere there are drainage ditches that are several feet deep carved into the paths around the resort and troughs big enough to swallow cars on the town streets. We got into a pretty heavy downpour during the first part of the horseback ride and my camera got a good soaking before I could get it covered but its still working perfectly fine, I seem to recall something about the e300 being water resistant but I'm not sure, I'm willing to take the risk though for some of the photos I'm taking back with me.

La Fortuna
The town of La Fortuna is just down the street from our resort, we went in for dinner last night and had some decent food, much better than the resort steak house which was a slab of reasonably good meat but sliced too thick and crudely grilled. I had Tilapia with a thin cheese and avocado sauce which was quite tasty. Dogs seem to be wandering around everywhere in populated areas, they seem to find a comfy place on a street corner or by a building and take a nap and seem to be quite content. Many of the local establishments advertise "Imperial" which seems to be the local budweiser/miller equivalent of beer, its not half bad if a bit bland compared to homebrew/microbrew.

Insects
I expected there to be more problems with insects up here in the rainforest area but so far we've only seen one mosquito. I've made sure to have insect repellant on whenever we've gone into the forest but around the buildings there are barely any apart from the occasional fly or spider.

Spelunking
Today we did the Venado caves tour. I didn't bring my camera and I was correct to leave it behind, without a water tight box it wouldn't have survived the journey anyway. The tour had a photographer along for part of the tour though so I have pictures from inside. Its great that high quality digital cameras are so readily available so you can go do a tour and walk away with a CD burned of your adventures. These pictures do not do a very good job of relaying the experience though, a simple flash makes the caves look illuminated but in fact they were very dark. We were issued halogen head lamps which helped navigate and my Dexlight flashlight performed very well as supplemental lighting and in high power mode was the brightest light on the trip. In low power mode it gave a nice strobe effect on some of the waterfalls and worked perfectly being submerged during some of the deeper sections. About half way in there was a large structure of fossilized coral, in the middle of inland costa rica. There were many narrow passages, a couple challenging climbs and one passage that we got to float through on our bellies since there was no other way to squeeze through. The water was very warm and comfortable and the workout from the climbing kept us warm and comfy despite being soaked to the neck. Wildlife included cave crickets which looked like huge spiders, actual physical huge spiders, a large number of bats and one crab that was finishing a meal that seemed to be the lower jaw from a deceased bat. Jon is finding he has a number of phobias through all of these activities and claustrophobia seems to be one of them after some of the squeezes. The climbs could have been dangerous if not taken carefully as they were rather high and no climbing gear was used.

Tree Fences
On the ride out to the caves, our guide explained that the fence posts we see everywhere are lopped off trees that are simply stuck into the ground and sprout leaves and roots, basically making living fence posts that barbed wire is strung between to make the multifarious cattle pastures.


Rainforest preservation through tourism
Tourism seems to be expanding quite well in this area though there seems to be a large number of the cattle pastures that people are saying are destroying the rainforests. I think the best solution to the problem is to make tourism so popular that the rainforest as a destination is worth more than using the land for grazing. So the best way to save the rainforest is to visit it and bring your tourist spending money out here. There are a number of construction projects going on, some seeming to have stalled, others moving along quite well.

1/5/08
1/4/08
N 10.50229
W 84.69499

Canopy tour



We went on the canopy tour today, basically a series of zip lines going from tree to tree up in the jungle. I got a few pictures with Ryan's point and shoot but overall it was a difficult photography venue since I needed both hands when on the lines and there wasn't much time on the platforms between runs. On the way up we saw a rather thick trail of leaf cutter ants but didn't have time to get any pictures. I highly recommend the zip line canopy tours for anyone that visits here. One of the runs ran along just above the river, I think some of the runs got up to at least 40mph before curving back up to slow down.

Horseback riding




I've never ridden a horse which surprises even me given that I grew up in western Mass which is quite rural. This is definitely something I want to do again though I think I need to take a break for my ass to recover, it's quite sore and bruised this evening, even after a soak in the mineral springs. I think its going to be worse tomorrow. I wish I had a better way of carrying my camera since it was a great chance to snap some pictures, the camera was bounced around quite heavily, especially when we kicked into a gallop. I need to get my legs in better shape though, it was a bit difficult holding on for the gallop. I switched horses at the top of our ride I think because Peka and Dar looked very similar to each other, I had Peka on the way up and Dar on the way down, I prefer whatever saddle Peka had versus Dar's, the handle was a bit more slender and taller and the stirrup length seemed to fit me better. I suspect when I ride in the US next time I'll probably kick a little and say "Vamos!" and the horse is just going to come to a grinding halt, snort and turn around and look at me funny.

The resort gave us all wristbands like we're at a giant bar or club, the nice plastic ones that wont fall apart in the hottub but its still an amusing note.

1/4/08
N 10.50229
W 84.69499

Arenal Paraiso Resort

We made the drive today from San Jose up to the Arenal Volcano park area. What was drawn as more or less a "major" highway on the map was twisted winding road up into the mountains. A beautiful scenic drive but I'm glad I was only charged with the task of navigating. Didn't get many pictures but will try to get more on the return trip. Made the stupid mistake of not keeping my spare camera battery up front with me and ran out of power as I tried to photograph the river beneath the bridge that I got a single shot of. A narrow windy road managing to squeeze tractor trailers occasionally along with scooters, bicycles, pedestrians, cows, farm machinery and more. Definitely not for a faint of heart driver and you really have to watch the road. I would not recommend this at night both due to the road conditions (including a metal sign post buried in the concrete in the middle of our lane to indicate a collapse down into one of the many canyons and crazy truck drivers doing 40-50km/h on sections of road that could barely fit them and the other lane of traffic, and also because the view is amazing, it was a wonderful scenic drive. We stopped at a pull-off near a small waterfall that was littered with garbage and construction debris but had some pretty shots, I didn't have my long lens and it was a short stop but we saw a few monkeys up in the trees. My first GPS unit I purchased was the only GPS aid I used today, I put in a few waypoints at key intersections which were mostly accurate though we did have to make a couple turnarounds to catch missed turns (mostly due to the view of signs being blocked by large trucks, etc) The signage here is extremely sparse,usually things are labeled after the turn but there are no road markers and very few numbers. The whole road up while windy and rather rural is dotted with little cafe type things called "sodas" that appear to be tiny snack restaurants. The first few miles had a large number of little farm stand things which seemed to focus on selling cheese.

The resort is a gathering of cabins speckled across the side of the hill overlooking the volcano. We have a couple 2 bedroom units next to each other. The clouds are still too low to see much, we're hoping that we'll get better views tomorrow. There are huge humming birds around and they seem to like the tropical flowers planted around the mineral springs. One was perched for a long time watching us until my dad decided to try and play splash with it, which it didn't seem to care much for. We spent time for a good soak in the natural mineral springs, though the ones closer to the spring which were the warmest were a bit crowded so ours were a little tepid but still relaxing. There appears to be internet access but it sounds like it might be limited to a public terminal with a limited login time. If that is the case, hopefully I can still post the text of this but photos may be delayed. We've scheduled canopy tours and a horseback ride for tomorrow which should be quite fun given that I've never had the chance to ride a horse before.

Super market salsa down here seems much tastier than back home. Heineken is about the same.