Costa Ricans have amazing fried chicken

Those of you who´ve been following the blog, both of you, may be signing in to hear about our promised adventures in Monteverde Cloud Forest. Well things took a turn in a different direction on Tuesday morning. We set out for Monteverde early in the morning, a trip that starts out with a short ferry ride that takes you across the gulf from the Nicoya peninsula into Puntarenas. On this ride we met a lovely couple on their honeymoon and we started talking about our travel plans. Upon hearing about our intentions for Monteverde, their travel guide got on the phone to his tour buddies and determined that the roads there had washed away and would not be accessible anytime soon. It´s actually fortunate that we found out from him for two reasons 1. We saved ourselves the effort of waiting for a bus that would never come and being stuck in the ultra shady town of puntarenas. 2. He was a travel guide and we were able to plan out an alternative destination with all the advice that an expert could offer. So by the time we docked we had new plans. Needless to say, it was a very interesting ferry ride. (not to mention the coked out guy with heart monitors still stuck to his chest who busted out into an epileptic seizure on the deck after eating the peanuts we gave him.)

Our new route sent us up to La Fortuna, a beautiful tourist town that sits at the base of the famous volcano Arenal. We finally got some good advice from our guidebook and are staying at this amazing hostile called Gringo Pete´s. This place is great. It is by far the cheapest place we´ve stayed, but the accomodations greatly surpass places that we´ve payed three times as much for. Anyone traveling to La Fortuna, (maybe not Mom) should try to get a bed here. We´ve been able to hobnob with so many people just like us, young travelers with absolutely no money. We even reunited with our Quebec girls by random chance and have been sewing the fruits of La Fortuna with them the last few days.

La Fortuna sits in the center of a region called the Arenal National Reserve. It offers oppurtunities for a ton of amazing tours and adventures. Gringo Pete in his endless wisdom also functions as a middleman for all of these tour companies. We can book tours through the hostile and they´ll come pick us up at prices that blow everyone else´s out of the water. (We´ve been instruced not to discuss what we paid with other people on the tours because they will invariabely get pissed off.) Yesterday, we visited this awesome swim hole just outside of town with waterfalls, rock-jumping, a rope swing and all kinds of other head-cracking activities. The second we got back to our room for a quick power nap (minus the quick, or the power). The rain started pounding harder than we´d seen it at all so far here. This of course bummed us out immensely because we feared that we faced another day lost to the rain in Costa Rica. We were especially upset because we had already booked a forest hike at the base of the volcano for the evening. We arrived at the hostile (our room is a few blocks away in a secondary lot for hoolagins) soaked to our choners and expecting to cancel the trip. The guide had other ideas. He just said "Pura Vida" (Which a guidebook will tell is the national slogan suggesting a relaxed and unstressed approach to life, my experience has taught me that a more direct translation is more akin to "Fuck it. We´re Poor." So we entered the shelter of the van through a sheet of some of the most intense rain we´d ever seen... and weren´t touched by another drop the rest of the night. In the twenty minutes it took us to get to the trail, the clouds parted and we were blessed to have the clearest, best night we´ve had here in Costa Rica. We took an incredible guided hike through the cloud forest where we saw toucans, howler monkeys, a giant white crested hawk and an indescribable array of flora and fauna. The walk concluded with our being witness to our first sunset in Costa Rica, as all the rest have been ruined by a wall of clouds. We then were taken to the base of the volcano to watch it erupt, which it does every few minutes. In the darkness, you can see massive boulders glowing red hot and exploding into hundreds of amber peices as they cascade down the face of the mountain. Unfortunately, it was too dark to take pictures, and having attended santa barbara city college, I lack quality of education to desribe the event in a way to do it justice. That was not the end of our evening however, next up was a visit to the Baldi hot springs resort and spa (entrance included in the tour price). The resort takes the naturally heated water from the volcano and turns it into a playground with over 15 pools of varying temperatures along with slides, waterfalls, bars and even a restaurant. It was truly a relaxing experience that left us as bubbling pools of viscious man-flesh where rigid humans once stood.

We woke up the next morning for yet another adventure, a day of ziplining through the canopy. It was absolutely unbeleivable. They just strap you to these cables and send you across from platform to platform and an insane rate of speed. One of the rides was over a third of a mile long. They also make you do them hanging upside down and in a position that they call the Super-Chicken where you´re flying from your back like superman. There was some concern that Jenny may not have the cojones (or even the ovaries) to go for it, but she did everything (though her terror was written on her face the whole time) and even managed to enjoy it. She did however struggle to grasp the concept of braking. She would come flying in to the end of the run with such crazy speed that you would think certain death awaited her as she would slam into the tree that held the cable. Of course the guides are prepared for that and would bring her to a quick, jerky, spinning violent halt. After the craziness of the zip-lines, we were brought to yet another hot springs resort. Apparently everything you do here ends in a hot tub, it´s like an episode of the Real World. "This is the true story of what happens when people stop taking showers..."

So the evening tonite will be spent lounging with our ecclectic group of international friends. I feel like one of Angelina Lee´s kids. We´ve decided that we love La Fortuna so much that we´re gonna stay here for the rest of our time in Costa Rica, save one evening in San Jose the night before our flight to Peru. The next few days promise even further adventure, a horseback ride to a waterfall on saturday, a possible trip to the lake, a canopy tour so we can finally see a damn sloth, and maybe Bed Bath and Beyond, I don´t know, I don´t know if we´ll have time

(P.S. also included are some pictures from Montezuma that we didn´t post last time.)

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