Arenal Backpacker's Resort La Fortuna

Day One Sunday we let for Nashville early in the morning. We waited around in the airport for a little bit before going through security, with less than 45 minutes to go through the line was much longer than we though. We began to think that we would miss our flight because it was taking so long. And Lauren was detained because of the amount of bobby pins in her hair left from the night before. After a good pat down and being scanned with the metal detector we ran to our gate and were one of ...

Day 4 Today we slept in after hanging out with our new roommates, Allie and Amanda. They are two really cool girls that are orginally from California but now live in Portland, Oregan. Since it was a georgous day, and actually not raining we decided to book hiking tour to the Arenal Volcano. A little background information on this volcano, as of five years ago the volcano did not exisit, then all of a sudden there was a small eruption and ever since it has been an active volcano, and now a lot...

...was wet. And steep. But beautiful.

We got into tiny San Jose airport fine and before long were in our awesome Montero Sport headed up into the mountains. What would have taken 45 minutes on a US interstate took 3 hours on steep, winding, pedestrian-filled roads... and it rained. Once we made it over the pass it began to clear as we headed into La Fortuna. The volcano, Arenal, then came into view; it's active, so it was smoking, too.

Our accommodations are good. We had a feas...

Hello everyone! Well, after a fairly difficult day on Friday that ended in a search for shoes (Argenis chose to throw things in class and got himself kicked out, then 'moved' - hid - our shoes by reaching through the window next to the landing where all the shoes are and throwing them below the landing, then was throwing rocks at the church and through the window, etc.) Ben and I headed for Quepos and Manuel Antonio national park. What a preface! First, I should say that most of the days have...

Today would be our last day with taz the surfer from Oz. We´ll miss the little guy very much. We left at 5:00am to all take the punt that immigration and the crossing would be open on Sunday. In luck.We took the boat 3.5 hours up the river back to San Carlos in the rain to find immigration would open at noon. Yippieee! Into Costa Rica. We are all running out of money due to no ATM´s anywhere in these parts. We had our passport stamped at san Carlos and jumped a motorboat on the Rio Frio to Lo...

We awoke on the day of our departure from Monteverde to the sound of knocking on our door at 10am from the hostel manager who was telling us that departure time was 10am and not 11am as every sign in the hostel said and as we had been told. After getting up and showered at our own leisure we were ready to vacate the room at 11am according to the sign and, although he didn't seem entirely happy about it, the hostel manager didn't try to charge us any extra. To pass the couple of hours that we ...

Left Tamarindo to drive out to Fortuna and Arenal. A beautiful drive into the mountainous northern part of the country were the landscape is gorgeous with a lot more green since they seem to get rain more often. It was another 4 hour drive but most of it was paved so it wasn´t as fun as our past drives. Once we got in we stumbled onto this hostel that had a pretty nice set up with a pool, swim up bar, nice rooms with private baths. I finally had internet access for the first time which to be ...

Two entries in two days makes you all very lucky. Yesty arvo i went off for a jungle walk, and saw a complete lack of anything that wasn't green and didn't moo. Was a very nice and not too strenuous walk though. The group before me saw spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and howler monkeys, and the group after me saw toucans, so i guess just bad luck. Then went to a viewpoint to check out the active volcano once it got dark enough to see it. Bit of lava, no photos that look like anything other ...

A day in San Jose was quite enough so we moved on. We got a bus to Ciudad Quesada / San Carlos (both these names are used interchangeably) and then another to get from there to La Fortuna, the closest major town to the active Arenal volcano. The journey from San Jose to La Fortuna crosses the mountain range that is the spine of Costa Rica, so by the time we arrived in La Fortuna, the weather was somewhat different. The baking hot sun and roasting temperatures on the south-west side has given ...