A heavy rain fell most of the night here at Arenal Kioro, our hotel on the side of the Arenal Volcano, which, this morning, is hidden in clouds.
After breakfast and good-byes to the friendly staff at La Mansion Inn, we meet our driver, Stuart, at the front of the hotel. Our “private car” turned out to be Panorama Tours’ twelve seat Mercedes van. I was surprised at the amount of vehicle for only three people, but the van turned out to be surprising comfortable.
The adventure began almost immediately, as we departed the town of Quepos, and the first of three bridges on the journey. The bridge crossing the river out of town turned out to be a one-laned marvel of engineering with steel plates laid across rusting trusses. Tour buses disengorged passengers on one side of the river, gave them their luggage to haul, and sent them across the rickety bridge to a twin bus on the other side. We waited about 20 minutes to cross, and were on our way up the coast, heading inland, northeast through transitional forest, where the higher elevation rain forests meets dryer coastal jungles.
Stuart turned out to be a terrific guide and joked that he was celebrating his 40th cumpleano by driving us. Stocky, buzz-cut and fair skinned, with a bottle-brush mustache, Stuart was engaging and informative. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in French from the University of Montreal, but he was a true Tico, both proud and knowledgeable about his homeland. I sat up front with him and chatted about language, life, family, history, culture, and he pointed out plants and landmarks along the 246 kilometer (152 mile) route.
We made our first stop at the south end of the Rio Tarcoles bridge, also known as Crocodile Bridge. Stuart let us out and drove to the other side, and Missy and I peered over the railing into the muddy waters at a dozen or more large crocodiles in the shallows.
Back in the van on the north side of the bridge, we settled in for the slow, comfortable progress through beachside towns (Jaco, Parritta), coffee planations, mountain hamlets (Atenas, Los Angeles), cattle, plantains, avacados, roadside stands selling sandia (watermelon), papaya, and mango, egrets, turkey vultures, and the stray perros that seem to be everywhere in this country.
The trip revealed the disparity between the lower classes (shacks with tin roofs and junk in the front yard) and the encroaching developing of norte Americano expatriates (”Las Brisas, mediterranean-style living from $515,000″). The highways were narrow and the traffic was light, but the trip took nearly seven hours, including twenty minutes parked on the Inter-American Highway (yep, Highway 1!) where the road was narrowed down to one lane for both directions while 28 Ticos stood around studying piles of hot asphalt.
We stopped in Los Angeles at the Cloudforest Restaurant for lunch of arroz con camarones and Imperial, the Costa Rican beer, and arrived in the Arenal area and the town of La Fortuna, at about 4:30 pm.
After so many hours in the car, we were both tired. Stuart left us to spend the night in La Fortuna, and then he was off to pick up another couple in Monteverde and take them back to San Jose.
We checked into our spacious “suite” which looks more like a high ceiling Mammoth condo than a resort hotel room. The is a hardwire Internet connection, DirectTV, a huge five person Jacuzzi, and a view of the side of Volcan Arenal out the wall of glass that comprises the south side of the suite. The gardens below are full of flowering tropical plants and the terrain reminded both of us of the hillsides of Lahaina.
Tired from travel, we tried to change our reservations for the Tabacon Hot Springs, but were unable to exchange our voucher, so we jumped in the hotel’s shuttle van and headed a few minutes down the road to the sprawling resort.
The hot springs are natural and man-made pools formed in the course of the Rio Tabacon. A sign at the edge of one pool claimed display the water temperature at 41.3 degrees Celsius, but the water did not feel hot enough to be 106 degrees Fahrenheit. After 90 minutes in the pools and waterfalls (towels, showers, and lockers provided), we enjoyed a “French Buffet” dinner in the resort’s dining room. When we called Arenal Kioro to retrieve us, we were pruned and relaxed, and the rain had begun to fall.
It is raining now, as I write this on Thursday morning. I have lost interest in seeing the lava flow (a wet slog to look at a mountainside shrouded in clouds doesn’t really appeal to me today), so we are heading to the hotel’s private thermal, Titoku, seven minutes west of here. We will soak, read, relax, and hope for better weather this weekend in Monteverde.
