Arenal and Monteverde

I've got some catching up to do, as it's been several weeks since I last blogged, and we have done loads in that time! From Tamarindo in Costa Rica we decided to drive to La Fortuna, south and east of San Jose. Arenal Volcano was a must-see on our itinerary and I had been grabbed by the idea of riding on horseback around the lake (short boat trip first) to the cloudforests of Monteverde and Santa Elena. Despie some creative navigating (yes, i hold my hands up to that one – and it was only sussed when John rightly pointed out that although my map-reading was very nice, we were in fact driving away from the big shiny lake and the great big buggering volcano), we made it there and took some lovely picttures of the lake. It's man-made, and has these banks of very red soil around it, as well as being overlooked by the two volcanoes at La Fortuna, so the view is pretty good, although the high windy lake road was anotther interesting ride.

La Fortuna was described as a really tacky town but again, either it wasn't THAT bad, or we are totally lacking in taste, because it WASN'T that bad. Yes, there was a McDonalds, but it still has those Central American charms (lack of running water, lvestock in streets, etc). We stayed in a nice backpacker's hostel managed by two very giggly girls who spoke no English, so we were back on Spanglish. Luckily they had two tiny rabbits, a black and a white one, so the girls and I bonded over those, and we also left a couple of beers in their fridge that we didn't get round to drinking, so friends were made.

That evening we drove in the dark, as you do, down a rock-hard, windy 10km mud track with ruts like buckets to see the volcano spit lava and rocks from a vantage point underneath it. (It's where they take all the tours, Mum and Dad. No worries.) Arenal is constantly active, but its last really big eruption (v big one, thousands killed) was in the fifties. It's erupted constantly ever since, but from 2004 onwards it calmed down, so you n longer get huge gouts of flaming rock flying through the air, just red and yellow streaks that run down the side and spit a bit. Still pretty damn cool though! Also saw my first glow-worms and fireflies twinkling about in the valley that night, so it was great fun and worth the bone-crunching ride!

The next morning we were due to get a boat at 8am to reach the other side of the lakeshore before getting our horses and doing the 3-hour trek to Santa Elena. There was a tour group of 30 or so braying all-inclusives on our bus and we were hoping that we wouldn't be stuck in a huge group with them, so when we got off the boat and found our own cowboy ready to take John and I off on our own for a private ride we were really excited.

Never thought I'd get John on a horse but he absolutely loved it (dosed up on antihistaminicos of course). Our cowboy was a really sweet guy called Nixon, who only spoke Spanish, and for three hours I managed to keep up a totally, utterly fluid Spanish conversation with him. We talked about his family and the horse training businesshe, the local ecology, Costa Rican politics, and loads of other things that I definitely can't discuss in Spanish, (Nixon also refers to himself in the third person, so that was a bit complicated.) Given my Spanish and his pronouns, one of us was probably talking to ourselves. But he was absolutely right about the horses, they were beautifully trained and so well-behaved that John was cantering along quite happily after quarter of an hour. Since I think the last time he rode was a donkey at the seaside aged 6, it was impressive! The birds were really lovely – one thing about Costa Rica I miss: even their bog-standard garden birds are black with red caps, or bright yellow with blue wings, or are actually multicoloured little hummingbirds.

When we got to Santa Elena, the town that sits between Monteverde and Santa Elena cloudforests, we were distinctly underwhelmed. Tour guides do outnumber the mosquitoes, and it's pretty soulless. Probably the most sterile, characterless town we have been in, just built to supply the demand for tours in the forests (and the tours themselves are well worth it, it's just that the town is so...crap). We anaged to book ourselves a room in a hostel with a big blue warehouse out the back. Odd, we thought. Not so when they started doing the soundcheck for the (uspeakably arse) music festival that followed that night.

Next day we went to Santa Elena Cloudforest, because we hard that Monteverde (bigger, but roughly similar ecosystem) received thousands and thousands more visitors than S. Elena. We wanted to hike around on our own, so we paid our $12 entry got a trail map, and headed off. John was not as keen as I was to do the four- hour hike on no breakfast, but eventually I bullied him into about 3 hours, taking a few different trails. We saw a black furry animal with a long tail sneaking around in the bushes early on and I was convinced I'd seen a jaguarundi, but it turned out to be one of the millions of raccoon-things that climb the trees in the forest. However, when we spotted two brilliantly green and blue birds with red and black markings and long split tails, it totally made up for the lack of smaall jaguars. We saw two quetzals!! They are really really shy and people don't see them too often, so we were v excited. Desite trying hard, we only managed to get a couple of blurry shots of what could have been a bloody pigeon, so little evidence to support our claim. But we did see them!

Later in the day we went for a walk on the suspensioon bridges (I had to be coaxed across the first of these, but where the tree canopy was dense it looked like the floor was a lot closer than the 50m away it actually was, so I felt better. One tour group has a sort of complex of animal houses just outside the forest, so we took a walk round their hummingbird and butterly gardens (there were frogs, snakes and insects too but a multipass was too expensive). They attract the hummingbirds using feeders of sugar water, but unfortunately that attracts wasps in the hundreds too, so to get close to the hummingbirds you have to take a chance on the wasps. The really tiny thumb-sized hummingbirds have no chance against a bunch of big wasps, so they squabble constantly over the least waspy feeders. Amazing to see them up close though. The butterfly garden was inside a big dome – and that really was wonderful, gorgeously coloured butterflies and so many of them. They kept landing on us, and our guide could just reach out and pick them up to show us their wings and patterns. John loved it especially, I don't think he'd ever been in a butterly garden like that before!

A four hour bus took us back to San Jose the next day and from there we hopped a flight to L.A. Sad to see Central America go, and I will definitely go again some day!