May we sit in your parking lot, kind sir?
Trip Start
Jan 09, 2007
1
4
11
Trip End
Jan 17, 2007
Santa Elena/Monteverde,
Costa Rica
Thursday, January 11, 2007
We got to leave with Miguel almost immediately thereafter. I had just enough time to take pictures of the rainy tropical foliage and fields, as well as the completely invisible volcano while the Germans packed up their vehicle. Miguel drove us around the volcanoes, pointing out anything of interest he could think of, including the room rates at the expensive resorts, the previous locations of the two towns that were wiped out in the eruption of 1968, and a flock of parrots. The last major eruption of Arenal, which blew open a second crater in the top and decimated the surrounding countryside was July 29, 1968. After his repetitions, it's going to be awhile before I forget that. He also pointed out the lava flow from 1992, which is what we ended up climbing.
Miguel dropped us off in the parking lot of Arenal National Park, gave us a map, some juice and cookies, and sent us on our way. The first kilometer of the hike was easy and straightforward. The ground was level, and contained the plants the farmers had once had in their fields in the destroyed towns, only now run wild. The trail met a road after that, and we got to walk as far up the volcano as we were permitted, to the viewpoint. It wasn't really very far up the volcano, relatively speaking, but there was a view of Lake Arenal and it was close enough to hear the mountain sighing and rumbling. At one point, I jumped the fence to go a bit further up the trail to the "Do not pass" sign, and it got distinctly louder. I guess there was a reason that fence was there.
The bum knee proved the worst hiking down the road from Arenal to join the trail again. Hiking up hill or on level ground was no problem, but downhill was a pain. I seriously considered picking up some of the cane lying by the side of the road for a crutch. Luckily, the section of road we'd gone up was only about another kilometer. After that, the trail continued on into what I considered the most boring part. Roughly two kilometers of secondary rainforest and no wildlife to speak of (that we saw). Secondary rainforest its not nearly as interesting as primary rainforest, which was what had been destroyed by the 1968 eruption.
But soon enough we reached the lava flow, where we sat and enjoyed our juice and cookies with the view, as Miguel had instructed us. A college group went by, with several people complaining that they were not near enough the molten lava for their taste, and, as far as they were concerned, this was just like hiking a mountain. Sarah and I looked at each, at the enormous volcano directly ahead that was beginning to peek through the cloud shroud, and at the huge chunks of lava that we were currently sitting on, and rolled our eyes. What did they want to do, throw pennies in it and make a wish?
After our snack, we continued down the lava flow to the third and final part of the trail. This part was supposed to be about two kilometers long, as well, through some primary rainforest. It was also supposed to contain the most wildlife. True to the paragraph on the map, we finally got to go through some jungly wilderness with enormous insects and things slithering and clunking out of sight just out of our field of vision. We also got to see two or three howler monkeys playing in the trees. There might be a few good pictures, out of the dozens that were attempted, but these were not tame monkeys accustomed to posing.
Eventually, we came to a fork in the trail that was not on the path. Shrugging, we picked the left fork, which did not say "guests only" as the right one did, and continued until we got to a river. There was a bridge, but it was slightly to our right, fenced off with barbed wire. We debated continuing down the river until we reached a slower moving spot to cross, or retracing our steps and taking the right fork and ignoring the sign, but while we were debating, a man popped out onto the bridge, and mimed us walking further down the river to the left. We walked a-ways, didn't see anything, and turned around. He was still waiting, and shooed us onward. A bit later, we did, indeed, get to a fallen log across the river, which was where he wanted us to cross. When you're limping along after a seven kilometer walk on a bum knee, carrying all sorts of hiking paraphenalia, getting up on a slippery log is not really all that appealing. It turned out fine, however, and we soon emerged by a ranger station.
The road to the right was fenced off, and the road to the left went to the butterfly garden. We did not see any more of the landmarks Miguel had described, and, in fact after talking to the ranger, we appeared to be stuck in the small parking lot. I asked if we could sit in his parking lot for a minute, the ranger shook his head despairingly, and waved us away in a "do what you will" gesture. After a brief consultation with the map and with common sense, we decided that it was highly unlikely that both directions were closed to us, as the road behind the fence looked like a public road. Determined to get to that road, even if we had to sneak around, we went back to the ranger hut, and this time when I asked if we could go that way, he said "Yes," where we'd gotten a resounding "No, you must go back to the beginning!" before. I think it was a miscommunication initially, but it really looked like he just didn't want us cluttering up his parking lot any longer.
Sure enough, we had no sooner ducked past the fence and gone round a bend in the road than we saw Miguel, busily washing his car while he waited. He whipped out some pamphlets so we could identify the monkeys we'd seen, and started the drive back to the hotel. At one point, we stopped to take pictures of some people feeding coatamundi by the side of the road. After we broke through the trees, we could see that the clouds had definitely cleared, and the top of Arenal was occasionally viewable, something that is not frequent and that people wait days for. Miguel produced binoculars from some hidden stash and let us look until he decided that we really needed to go eat now if we were to make our taxi. While he was trying to point out that we could even see lava as white trails, we're still not sure we ever caught that. The volcano was also emitting little puffs of steam from various spots around its circumference, from base to top, which we did notice.
A quick lunch later, we caught a taxi for a brief ride out of Fortuna to Lake Arenal, where we were taken on a boat across the lake to be dropped off on the other side. Another small bus caught us on the other side to take us the remaining two hours over rutted dirt roads to Santa Elena. Though this amounted to roughly four hours of traveling, we'd gone only about 30-40 kilometers (20 miles). We arrived slightly after dark to Vista al Golfo Cabinas, down in a bit of a canyon on the mountain. The wind was the loudest wind I have ever heard in my life, and it never stopped. Those folktales about spirits screaming in the wind seem so much more realistic now. But this wind didn't howl so much as roar, causing the cabin to shudder and a very fitful sleep to ensue. Every time a slight lull would cause the noise to get to a more reasonable level, another huge gust would come through, causing glass to break and various crashes and bangs to occur somewhere else around the cabins or in the valley.
