Hola, amigos míos. 😊
I hope y’all enjoyed your Tuesday. 😊 It’s been a completely full day here on our end–and a lovely one at that. 😊
Let’s see… i slept in until about 7:30, having a dream I enjoyed immensely and didn’t want to have end, but something woke me up, and I couldn’t get back to it like I wanted–something like that, at least. 🙃
John and I then did a short ab workout before heading off for our morning breakfast at the hotel restaurant–good food, and lots of it. I absolutely stuffed myself. The funny thing was that i was still hungry even after the hugely mounded plate-full of food and a second (though much smaller) helping.
We’d planned to go back to the La Fortuna waterfall area, but this time to walk the hanging bridges that they have spanning small canyons above the forest canopy, but after talking with the waiter during breakfast, he suggested a different hanging forest adventure place, one where we could explore on our own. That sounded super cool, so we finished stuffing our faces and headed that way (something Mistico was the name of the place, I think). It was over my the dam near Lake Arenal.
I was slightly disappointed when we got there and learned that what he meant by exploring on your own was walking the trail as cement stone trail as quickly or as slowly as you wanted to.
I guess he didn’t really understand what Stephen adventures look like. 🙃
So it wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but it was still just amazing–truly. The flora was awe inspiring in places, and I loved the hanging bridges. It was just… wonderful. 😊
I want to make that bet clear before moving on to what came next. I don’t want to diminish the touristy things we did. Yesterday, La Fortuna waterfall was breathtaking, and the water a delight to swim in. The national park volcano trail was exciting, sort of the introduction to an exciting new world. And the hot spring pools on site at our hotel were enjoyable.
And today, the hanging bridges and mountain jungle trail walk was absolutely beautiful–awe inspiring multiple times–the sheer size of some of the trees, or the way other massive trees had few branches and no leaves until perhaps 60-100 feet above the ground. And when they did leaf out, from below it looked like there was only one later of leaves, but the branches fit together like puzzle pieces. Anyway, super cool. We saw some beautiful hummingbirds, some howler monkeys (howling) in the distance, and yeah… It was great. 😊
So… again… not taking anything away from what was truly amazing.
But… I’m an explorer. I’m an adventure finder. I may be 40, but… it’s just… in my blood. I want to go out and create the adventures, create the stories, not just… look at stuff. 🙃
So after a day and a quarter of wonderful gorgeousness looking at stuff, I… was ready to go do some real exploring. 😊
We decided we’d pick a mountain (one that was legal to climb, and just… head on up (these are jungle mountains, so… thick thick foliage–vines everywhere, lots of huge, broad-leaved plants… just… etc.).
So we left the hanging bridges place, drove around Lake Arenal a bit, found a little place to ditch the car, and started to head on up.
Side note: The bowels have been a little… Off schedule on this trip, so the first stop as we headed up, for me, at least, was losing a little weight via the bottom end. I thought it was funny that I didn’t notice I was squatting right next to a red and hill. 🙃
Anyway, on we went through the jungle, following what looked like a game trail (watching for critters and insects and whatnot. Did you know Costa Rica has 20,000 species of spider, including the world’s deadliest?
Yup.
Anyway, one of the things I wanted to see was if the jungle we’d been exposed to on the trail walk was representative of the “real” jungle, do we hiked along.
We were in shorts and t-shirts, so we weren’t so prepared. Our only preparation for potentially unhappy critter encounters being the bottle of deet juice to ward off the biteybugs.
No machete, no bear spray, no long pants or long-sleeved shirts…
We realized very quickly that we were unprepared, and that being this unprepared, it wasn’t so smart to continue as we were, so we headed back down to the car.
We did satisfy ourselves that, though not obviously manicured, the jungle first we trailed through seemed… tamed. The vegetation wasn’t as thick. I think there were fewer dead plants, etc.
Not being educated on the Costa Rican flora so much, we were a little concerned we’d gotten ourselves contaminated with poison ivy (or similar relative), so when we got to the car, we drove around looking for a steam to rinse off in.
We found a beautiful one, but it was a 20-foot, or more, drop to the stream floor, and the only way back would be bushwhacking through the very types of plants we were concerned about.
Fortunately, and 5 minutes later, we found an inlet where we could access the lake directly, and we parked, all by our lonesome, just 100 feet of the water, waded in, and ah… it was lovely.
It was right about then, with me in the water reeds all around us, and John just starting to wade in, that John asked about crocodiles.
😶
Surely, no.
Right?!?!
Let’s just say I was fairly quick back out of the water to my phone, a little nervous after John’s question.
I went over to my cell phone, and started Googling. Were there crocodiles in Lake Arenal?
Ummm… yes!
😶😶😶
But there weren’t… many? And no reports that I could find of attacks, and it wasn’t mating season (which would be more dangerous), and people talked about the lake being a great place to swim (people meaning posts on the internet. 🙃).
So… with a little trepidation, but determined, I went back in and enjoyed a lovely swim, albeit with about the same nervousness I have about sharks when swimming/surfing in the ocean.
Still, it was lovely. And we were the only ones out there.
I love swimming in lakes. My favorite ever.
After that, John wanted to rent some 4 wheelers and take the 4-wheeler tour version of the volcano. So we drove back to town, only to find out they didn’t have any openings. With the last few hours of light, we decided to just go drive–see what we could find wandering about.
That, my friends, is stephen traveling. 😊 (one aspect, anyway). Looking at the map, I found a road that headed directly into the jungle mountains, away from everything, and went and went and then just… ended… With nothing but roadless jungle for a long ways after the road ended.
So I pointed the car that direction and we set off. At first, it was known, passing the volcano national park. Then it was familiar–having not seen that specific area before, but it being similar to where we’d already been.
Continuing on, we the blacktop gave way to potholey blacktop, which in turn, gave way to potholey dirt road.
Home. 😁
We followed that dirt road for i don’t know how long, until we came to one of my favorite places I’ve ever been–ever.
We pulled up on a river crossing where the locals have to drive across about a 200 foot wide river in order to get to where they live on the other side. The river itself was just… gorgeous, but the mix of river, and jungle, and hills was breathtaking. Looking out across the river toward the jungle mountains this turtle-shell shaped hill jutted out from the river bed so steeply. It was… yeah, brilliant.
It was there that John and I decided that the next adventure was going to be following the river, up, up, up, and up into the mountainous jungle, as far as we could go. 🙂
That’s going to be our adventure for tomorrow. 😊
But we had a lovely little experience right then and there as well. While we were hanging out on the river’s shore, a pickup truck pulled up with a big empty tree-carrying box in the back. They’d been doing deliveries of the trees they sell, and they pulled up to the river crossing. There was a 35-year-old woman (the driver), her mother (I’m guessing), and man. They were looking at the river, and I was encouraging them to make the drive across.
Of course. 🙃
The mom was pretty nervous thinking about it, but John showed her a video he’d taken of the last ones to cross it, and seeing the video, the daughter decided to give it a whirl, and the mother gave her thumbs up as well.
What was unexpected at that point was that the daughter invited us to hop in the bed of the pickup truck to enjoy the journey across, standing up, holding onto the tree hauling frame.
That took John back 17 years to our Peru trip, and left him commenting that of course “no trip with stephen is complete until you’ve ridden on the top of some vehicle or another. 🙃
So they drove us across the river and then on the dirt road (back towards the lake but in another direction) for probably 10 minutes, before turning around and heading back.
It might not sound like much, but it was so much fun. 😊 Fun to do it, fun to recall past similar experiences, fun to enjoy it with the Costa Ricans we’d encouraged to be a little adventurous. 😊
Good stuff. Smiles ear to ear. Good times.
Back on the other side, we skipped rocks, munched on our snacks, made plans for our self-guided jungle river tour, and enjoyed a light sprinkle and a wonderful dearth of insects. 🙂
On the way out if that little paradise, we stopped off at a little market in the tiny village (I’d asked a local gentleman who was crossing the river where I could get a machete, and he told us where, so we stopped off and bought a machete for tomorrow’s excursion (not so much for bushwhacking, as we’re going to be following the river in the river, but for protection against jaguars and mountain lions. 🙃
Last excursion for the day was going to a different set of hot springs. The sun had gone down, but we’d passed the springs probably… 8 times? And not stopped, so tonight was our night. 🙂
During the day, it’s super crowded, but at night, it wasn’t too bad at all.
Interestingly, though, the pools were like… 14 inches deep? They were super shallow, enough to get your whole body under without a problem lying down, but a bit different than I’m used to. Also, the water wasn’t hot. It was like bathwater. Which was still nice, but not the hot that i usually expect from a “hot” spring.
I suggested we go further up the river because it was likely the source of the hot water was further up, so we started to hike up this river too. 🙃
And what did we find?
Go upstream just 100 yards further than where all the pools are that people have built, and #1 it gets hotter. #2, it gets deeper, and 3. There pretty much no one there. 🙃
The little area we find was super cool. The water was raging pretty good, so you had to wedge yourself in places where the current would push you against the rocks and hold you in place. 🙂
It was really neat being there. Moonlight overhead. A firefly in the trees. And the most amazing? This was not just a river that had hit water bubbling up in spots that you could create hot pools out of: No, this was a completely hot river. The whole freaking thing. It was nutty–and awesome. Still, not hottub hot, but nice bathwater temp.
Good stuff. 😊
From there, we it was to the super market where we bought food, and I bought another set of tighty whities and a pair of shoes to use as my water hiking shoes for tomorrow’s adventure.
The machete got it’s maiden voyage splitting a cantaloupe, and it’s after midnight but, so I’m gonna call it a night.
Love to all y’all.
Lift the World.~
~ stephen
Lift the World 
Wonderful!
😊