Volcano Spotting
Trip Start
Jun 11, 2005
1
17
25
Trip End
Jun 05, 2006
La Fortuna,
Costa Rica
Saturday, September 17, 2005
After a grim journey across country, we treated ourselves to a nice motel, and as the volcano was in cloud, we spent the day catching up on emails and budgets etc.
We heard numerous rumblings throughout the day, and the lava flow is sometimes visible at night, but the cloud prevented us from seeing anything worthwhile. As we'd struggled to make our way around Costa Rica, and had yet to see any volcanic action, we decided to hire a car to improve our mobility.
The next day we picked up our hire car and drove out to the foot of the volcano (or at least the car park a safe distance from the foot). The cloud had mostly cleared now, and although the glow of lava was too dull for us to see it in daylight, we got great views of smoke spewing from the top, and little cascades of ejected matter rolling down the side of the cone. With out new found freedom, we explored the area, which was wonderfully scenic, and drove south through miles of coffee plantations on our way back to San Jose. We stopped the night at another nice hotel, where I discovered that the last couple of months of TV denial had left me with a side effect- TV obsession. So thrilled I was at having a TV with 50 channels that I just couldn't stop switching between them. Of course there was nothing on worth watching, so hopefully the obsession will be short lived.
Our next stop was Guatemala, and we'd discovered that to go via Ticabus would take us 3 days each way - a 6 day round trip! Fortunately we found some reasonably priced flights which meant that we could spend our time a little better than hunched up next to a chemical toilet for nearly a week.
We dropped our hire car off at the airport, and after a couple of excellent cups of complimentary coffee, and a hurried call from the terminal to the hire car company to retrieve our video camera, we were in the air and on our way to Guatemala, gateway to the Mayan civilisation...
