Caving, hiking, lava and hot springs

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In the morning we swapped rooms from our dungeon on the botton floor with one window, up to another room upstairs - this one was a lot brighter with several windows and a balcony with a view of the volcano.

After breakfast we headed out to Vedano caves, where we were given rubber boots, helmets and flashlights. We hiked down a path and explored the cave system there for a couple of hours. It was pretty cool and there were a lot of little gaps that we had to squeeze through. At one point I got to lead a group through a little tunnel with about 30cm of headroom above the water. There were bats, some pretty big tarantulas and other spiders. The guide also pointed out a fish that was supposedly living in the stream running through the cave - the cynic in me thought that this was just a little too convenient, and maybe they had just put the fish in there...

We got back to Fortuna and were hungry to do more stuff - when you spend whole days travelling you kinda want to do as much as possible with the time you have. We headed off on a tour with Mauricio, a very friendly and amusing local guide. He took us on a short hike through the jungle in the Arenal National Park, which lead up to the large lava flow from the big eruption in 1992. We watch the sun go down and headed back along the trail, through the dancing fire-flies.

The view of the volcano was mostly unobstructed by clouds (as it was the previous night) and we had already seen one big explosion. Once it was dark we stopped at a dark spot by the roadside to watch the lava flows in the distance. The lava has been spewing forth since the first big eruption back in 1968.

Our last stop was at the Baldi Hot Springs, which are definitely the best hot springs I have seen. They have a large number of pools of varying temperatures, including wet bars, hot waterfalls, hot pools with cool pools inside and some pools which are too hot to go near (the hottest was 67C!). We wandered up through some of the paths to the Mayan pyramid (the place is like a theme park) and saw our first armadillo, which a girl had caught and showed us before letting it scamper away. We found that the hot/cool pool combo was the best place to relax and watch the bat flying laps around the pool. After a while we discovered that we could sit in the hot pool and watch the lava flows from there - very cool!

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