Another volcano (and a sloth)
Trip Start
Sep 28, 2007
1
22
33
Trip End
Ongoing
La Fortuna,
Costa Rica
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
La Fortuna used to be a small farming town. Now it is a small tourist centre of about 10,000 people. It lies at the foot of the extremely steep volcan Arenal, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, and the reason for the town's name. Arenal woke form a many millenia slumber in 1968 and destroyed two villages to the west of it. Around 80 people died, but no one knows the exact number or ever will. La Fortuna changed its name to express its sense of relief at its good fortune. The volcano emits pyroclastic lava flows constantly on its far side which now provide a major tourist attraction. More on that later.
We got to La Fortuna along a very rough dirt road to lake Arenal where we took a ferry almost to the town. It is about 34 km from Santa Elena to the ferry, and it took us a little over an hour and a half in a decent minivan that did not have to stop for anyone
Volcan Arenal
.The ferry crossing was pretty impressive. Lake Arenal is a very large hydro dam that supplies something like 40% of Costa Rica's energy and lies beneath the volcano. On clear days the volcano is reflected in the lake (so they say, we didn't have a clear day), and the lake is supposed to provide excellent views of the nightly lava shows.
According to the Rough Guide, perhaps as many as half the tourists who came to La Fortuna never see the mountain clear of cloud. People from Taranaki can imagine how easily this could happen. So we were extremely lucky that our first night there had moments when even the peak was clear and our volcano tour had a mostly clear view of the eruptions. Our second day was even clearer, and we were treated to the most amazing sunset with the mountain and town square in the foreground and the golden skies from the setting sun behind, with the old crater of Cerro Chato to the left forming a saddle directly in line with the sunset. It would be very corny in a movie,but in real life it is very impressive.
Our volcano tour was pretty lifeless, and for anyone who reads this for guidance, I recommend not doing it
Coati crossing the road
. The volcano puts on a pretty show, but you wouldn't need an overpriced tour to do it. The best bit was actually the drive out on which we saw a three-toed sloth and a small group of howler monkeys. We started with a volcano 'hike' which was a three km wander through a reserve where animals might sometimes be seen I suppose were you there by yourself. The guy taking the walk was pretty good, but you can't salvage this kind of thing. We saw some Montezuma oropendulas fly overhead and a bright red summer tanager, and the silhouette of two toucans (which he claimed were probably brown mandibled toucans).
Then we watched the volcanoe from the side of the road as cars whipped past us in either direction. It wasn't a bad vantage point in some ways, but it wasn't what we had expected. Apparently there is a more formal look out but it gets crowded.
The eruptions are quite interesting. You see a red glow form quite high up on the mountain (but well below the peak) which gets more intense and then starts to roll down the mountain until eventually it shatters and sends bits of lava in all directions. Through binoculars it was quite dramatic, although nothing like the photographs all over town (apparently taken with time lapse techniques). The lava is solid and so it rolls rather than flowing. At times there were three or four lumps rolling down the slope. Wherever you are there are flows coming down the other slope that you can't see, so at times we could see the glow of a flow going down the other side of the ridge, but the lava itself was invisible to us.
