We’re settled into life here in Costa Rica, which has largely meant making peace with seeing the money flying out of our bank account.  We sure ain’t in Nicaragua anymore.

Nadia contributes to the economy by adding another country to her growing toenail clipper/bottle opener collection.

To be fair, the two main places we’ve stayed thus far — Monteverde Cloud Forest and Arenal Volcano — are major tourist destinations.  There are many, many things to do — and all of them cost big bucks.  We were very happy that we’d done ziplining and some guided cloud and rainforest tours in Nicaragua.  The main thing that’s killing us is that here, everything is charged per person.  This makes sense to us for some things, but perplexes us when it comes to hiring a tour guide.  If one of us wanted a guided tour, the guide would take that person around for $18.  But if five of us want to tag along — well, now we’re up to $18 * 5.

For obvious reasons, we don’t have many good pictures from the night tour. This is a phosphorescent beetle, kind of like a firefly, on Lanie’s head.

So, we’ve been pretty selective on which of the vast array of available activities to pursue.  In Monteverde, we signed up for a night tour of the cloud forest, but skipped the guided daytime tour and just walked around on our own.  The night tour was pretty cool, and we saw some interesting animals — a sloth, an olingo (which apparently is related to the kinkajou), a tarantula, a porcupine, and a glowing beetle — but the place we did it was mobbed with groups of tourists, all crowding around the same trees and bumping into each other in the dark.  (We also did the El Trapiche tour, as previously described, and this was unanimously felt to be worth the hefty price tag based on the food samples provided.)

Our first view of Volcan Arenal.

We set out for our next destination, Arenal Volcano, with some trepidation.  I think we may have failed to describe the drive to Monteverde because we’re trying to block it out of our memories, but “harrowing” would be a good word to describe the boulder-strewn barely-a-road through the mountains (surrounded by beautiful scenery that we were unable to appreciate because of (a) motion sickness, and (b) the terror that at any moment the car would break an axle or get a flat tire).  When we finally arrived, we parked the car in the driveway and pretty much didn’t move it again until it was time to leave.

It’s five o’clock somewhere.

If you look at a map, Monteverde and Arenal seem to be quite close together.  However, because the drive involves 45km on a dirt road followed by a long drive around a lake, it takes 3-4 hours.  Bob and I focused our thoughts on the microbrewery that we had read was halfway to our destination, and forced ourselves into the car.

This drive, though terrible by ordinary standards, turned out to be a little easier than the previous one, so we were pleasantly surprised.  The car only made horrible clunking noises (as it hit the rocky road) a few times, and we only stalled a couple.  For the most part, we didn’t need to shift into first and chant, “I think I can…” to make it up the hills.  And oh, that magical moment when we got to Lake Arenal and the pavement began.

Things went so well that we actually arrived at the brewpub, our planned lunch destination, about 10:30.  Fortunately the owner was friendly, and happy to have us sit there for a while using their free wifi — and Bob and I decided to stretch a point on “appropriate hours for beer consumption.”  The brew pub was gorgeous, with huge windows overlooking the lake, but the beer was rather disappointing.  (I tried a pineapple beer, which sounded quite exciting, but turned out, like the other beer we tried, to not taste like too much.)

And our apartment in La Fortuna, at the base of the dramatic Volcan Arenal, turned out to be terrific.  The minute we arrived, the owner William, who lived the next apartment over, had brought his dog out to play with the girls and was proudly showing us all the edible plants that were growing in the yard and up for grabs.  The apartment was just a block or two from the town center, easy to find (probably the first time we didn’t have to reverse

La Fortuna

our tracks multiple times!), and had everything we needed.  The volcano photo at the top of this post is the view from our living room window.  The town was cute (though very touristy), with a lovely town square featuring lots of flowers and dramatic views of the volcano rising above the pretty church.

We took our first day pretty easy, getting some schoolwork in and walking to a nearby (free!) swimming hole.  (This was absolutely beautiful, with twin waterfalls gushing into a deep blue pool under the trees, but we were warned so thoroughly about theft that we didn’t bring our camera

Also, our apartment has iguanas in the yard.

with us.)  On the advice of our host, we’d booked an animal-watching tour the next day — 5:30am sharp!    Read all about it from Lanie tomorrow.