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Published: December 8th 2009
We left the Arenal area in the rain, sheets of rain, but the temp was hot. I had heard lots about the drive north around Lake Arenal but had no idea how bad part of it would be. The lake is man made, after the volcano erupted and covered part of the town of Arenal in 1968, a few years later they made the dam and flooded the valley to make this enormous lake and re-located the town. A guy told us that if you go on a boat in the lake you can see the church steeple sticking out of the water from the flooded town.
The views were spectacular, driving around the lake in the rain forest, but the road needs work. There were mudslides across the road, some with vegetation already growing on them so obviously had been there a while. The bridges are always only wide enough for one car and on parts of the road a bit of the river is flowing over the road. There were a few gulleys where the road had already partially slid away and it looked like the rest of the road would give way any moment, but we had to
road around lake arenal
gulley about to give way, gushing waterfall on the right, pot holes in the middle and landslide on leftget through....the beach was waiting for us.
We stopped at a little coffee place called Todos Macadamias on the top of the hill looking over the lake to all the windmills on the ridge at Tilaran. Again what a view!. Not sure if you'll be able to make out all the windmills behind Sophie, way over on the next ridge beyond the lake. We had giant macadamia nut cookies, cinnamon buns, espresso, hot chocolate and bought some local coffee to take with us and raw macadamia nuts in salsa! It was a perfect little stop-over and the man there gave us a great short-cut to take 30 min off our drive.
We were both game to try it but our GyPSy didn't like it. When we took the turn off, it was straight up, up, up a really muddy, rocky new road which looked like it had just been plowed into the hill yesterday. GyPSy was telling us we had gone off the road, make a u-turn to go back. We slid around a bit until Doug hit the 4x4 button (whew, it does work). Honestly an F250 would have been more appropriate but our RAV4 did
fine, except for that one really big rock. We actually were driving on an access road to the windmills for the workers to service them and it was great fun; it got much better towards the top and we ended up directly under the windmills. It was like standing beside a jet engine. Only one other vehicle on the entire road was an official looking truck going down the hill and the guy looked at us funny. Anyway we made it, GyPSy quit talking to us until we could finally see the highway ahead. I think we saved some time. The weather was much better once we got away from Lake Arenal, hot and dry going towards the playa.
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Tracy
non-member comment
Those roads look fine, you big baby. Looks like you're having a great time! is that a giant cookie Harry's eating?