This weekend was my first planned excursion with AIFS. After Spanish class on Friday my resident director Rebecca, a tourguide, and thirty of my classmates got onto a coach bus heading for the Arenal Volcano, Northwest of San Jose. We made a couple of stops on the way including a suspension bridge that overlooked a beautiful river surrounded by our first glimpse of relatively untouched rainforest.
We reached the Arenal Volcano in enough time to get a rare glimpse of its summit. Most of the time, its summit is obscured by clouds due to the high humidity in the area. If you look closely enough at this picture, you can see the small sliver of the summit overtop of the clouds.
 |
| Arenal Volcano, look at the very top of the cloud to see the summit. |
That night we went to the hotsprings resort at the base of the volcano. There were dozens of pools of water naturally heated by the volcano. It was very relaxing, and every twenty minutes or so we heard a rumble of thunder. The rumble of thunder was actually the volcano erupting. It is quite active. If you look closely enough at night, you can see bits of lava spewing from the top.
The Saturday morning we woke up quite early to go on a long hike to La Fortuna waterfall. We hiked through the forest down hundreds and hundreds of steps to the waterfall and the river. Then we had a chance to swim in the rapids and the river for an hour or so before hiking back up to the bus.
 |
| La Fortuna Waterfall |
Afterwards, we took these jeep-vans to the lake surrounding the Arenal Volcano. We took a ferry to a different part of the lake. This was approximately a 45 minute ride, because the lake was absolutely enormous. Unfortunately it was cloudy on Saturday, so we did not get to see the summit of the volcano, but we did ride past it in the boat. After we reached land, we took a two hour drive in the jeep-vans on the scariest road I have ever been on. In fact, they sell t-shirts that say, "I survived the road to Monteverde." It was a dirt/rocky road, that circled around the mountains. There were many times when I feared that we might fall over the edge of the cliffs. However, this was a really good opportunity to see the countryside, and the views were spectacular.
 |
| These were the girls who were in the same Jeep-van with me, our driver let us take a quick photo at the summit of one of the mountains. If you look off in the distance, you can see the Pacific Ocean. |
After reaching a town near Monteverde, we checked into the hotel. It was another nice hotel, and this was the first one that had both water pressure and warm water! That night we went to a local restaurant and checked out the town at night.
 |
| AIFS |
 |
| Some of the girls |
After a very early breakfast on Sunday, we drove to the Monteverde Cloud Forest. In a part of the cloud forest, there is a Zip-lining place. We were given harnesses, helmets, and gloves with a leather piece in them to hold on to the lines. There were fifteen different zip-lines total that overlooked different part of the Cloud Forest canopy. We started out with shorter ones. While on the zip-line, we were able to pick up a lot of speed, at the end we used the special gloves to hold onto the line and slowdown. At the end of each zip-line, there was a worker that transferred us to the next line. One of the lines was 3/4 of a mile long! I even got to do this Tarzan swing where that had a huge drop. It was practically like bungee jumping, but it was safer because we did not jump headfirst.
On the way back to San Jose, we drove past the Pacific Ocean. There were a lot of Ticos also returning to San Jose from the beaches, so the police closed the other side of the road to oncoming traffic. We ended up driving on the wrong side of the road most of the way back to San Jose.
 |
| My first close-up of the Pacific Ocean, later I will get a chance to swim and snorkel in it! |
No comments:
Post a Comment