La Fortuna & Arenal, Costa Rica

Reunions, lush scenery, an elusive volcano, an abundance of animals in the wild and the first rain we've seen in a while! Our time in Costa Rica has got off to a flying start.

Mike and I had another long day travelling from
Isla Ometepe, starting with the lancha trip back to the mainland at 6:30am. Thankfully the water was much calmer than our previous crossing, not that this was hard to beat. Two short chicken bus rides got us to the Costa Rican border by mid-morning. We'd expected to have to wait at this border-crossing for a while as everything we had read said it was an extremely busy crossing that can take a couple of hours. It seemed that we must have caught the place on a good day as we managed to exit Nicaragua, walk across the border and enter Costa Rica all in the space of about 20minutes. This was great except for the fact that we'd allowed ourselves ample time before needing to catch one of only two daily buses to our next destination of La Fortuna, so we had about 4 hours to kill at the border. Unfortunately Costa Rica's local bus system doesn't seem to be as frequent as other countries, so we settled in to read and watch movies whilst constantly trying to escape the sun that kept taking away our shade.

Finally 2pm rolled around and we hopped on the bus bound for El Tanque which is a small settlement about 7km from La Fortuna, which was our base for a couple of nights. We're out of the chicken bus game and back to regular coaches, which is less of a novelty but at least it's more comfortable. By nightfall we reached El Tanque where we reunited with our old Kiwi flatmate in London, Aaron (AKA Shorty) and his English girlfriend, Emily. These two will be our travel companions for the next two weeks in Costa Rica while they're on a wee holiday and we've pooled together to hire a car to give us some more freedom. We've opted for a 4WD as some of the roads in Costa Rica are unpaved and generally in pretty crap condition, so Terry our Daihatsu Terios will be our transport for the next wee while. Not gonna lie, two weeks free of buses will be a dream!

Costa Rica only has a handful of decent sized towns, for the most part they are only small towns or villages. La Fortuna is a small village/town that sits at the base of Volcán Arenal. It was a bit of a strange one, mainly restaurants, souvenir shops and tour operators - so catered to tourists. It's a a bit of change from other places we've been but it only comprises of a couple of streets so it doesn't take much to get away.

We went deep on the activities and wildlife spotting on our first full day in Costa Rica. A huge downpour of rain during breakfast quickly disappeared and paved the way for hot sunshine. Our first stop was to Arenal 1968, a set of trails just next to the Volcán Arenal National Park. These trails and even a lake in amongst them, were formed by the 1968 eruption of the volcano. Costa Rica has seen a hike in prices and therefore our allocated daily budget, for any kind of activity. Every national park has a fee and even to walk the 1968 trails just on our own was $10 a pop. It's rough, especially when you're used to free entry to national parks and any walks in NZ but we've had to accept it's where our money is going if we are to see or do anything here!

Em is a budding photographer with a passion for wildlife so we're on wildlife watch big time and we're both enjoying having someone to take photos with. Arenal 1968 was our first opportunity for this, but mainly we just saw some different birds (one of which was a woodpecker - amazing) and a couple of awesome brightly coloured lizards. We had the trail mostly to ourselves and it took us through some lush greenery took a lake and then through some volcanic rock paths. All the while, the top of Volcán Arenal unfortunately stayed hidden, as it did for the whole time we were in La Fortuna and it's surrounds.

Driving back to La Fortuna from the Arenal 1968 trails, we found a few people stopped on the side of the road looking up into the trees. Intrigued as to why, we stopped too and soon found out that it was a sloth in the trees! It surprised us how fast the sloth moved and it was amazing watching it climbing through the branches just out in the wild.

As usual the trails didn't take us nearly as long as the signs predicted so we were left with many hours in the day to fill. Thankfully we managed to find some of the only free spots to hang out for the rest of the day, the first of which was the El Salto waterfall and rope swing. This is a small waterfall, only 2-3m high but it provided a hugely refreshing dip. So refreshing that we ended up too cold and headed straight to the natural hot springs afterwards. Costa Rica has so far bought a welcomed decrease in temperatures for Mike and I, so we're thoroughly enjoying not sweating every minute of the day at the moment. If you'd told me I would be visiting a hot spring a couple of days ago I probably would have had a meltdown at the thought of the idea! There are many hotels and resorts offering hot springs around this area but being the cheapskates we are, we hunted down the free ones.

We bathed in what was essentially a hot river, with multiple layers of different pools to sit in. It had some surprisingly decent flow, to the point that you had to wedge yourself against a rock or you could easily get pushed down into the next pool. We even had the company of a hummingbird whilst in our makeshift bath.

Costa Rica is already noticeably different in terms of infrastructure, prices and catering to tourists. In saying that, it's a stunningly beautiful country and the amount of wildlife we've seen in just one day, in their natural environment, is insane. We're all excited for what's ahead. Not to mention its much cleaner than previous countries and we can finally drink tap water again. Hooray! As the Costa Ricans would say, Pura Vida!

Next stop, Monteverde.Read more