“The poorer the general populance of a country, the more likely their buses and bus drivers can defy physics on mountain ridges.” – Old Sean
Northern Green Mountains
After my tour of Bajos del Toro, I made my way back to Zarcero in the hopes of eventually reaching La Fortuna.
Buses in Costa Rica are not ideal, though they’re substantially better than much of Central America. However, instructions are usually somewhat confusing and can conflict with one another. Online resources are primarily in Spanish and direct routes anywhere aside from San José are somewhat of an oddity.
It takes a fair amount of patience to get through Costa Rica’s public transportation system. It’s far better to rent a vehicle, but the cost of car insurance for rentals these past years has become rediculous.
Hence, my time is spent riding with friends, hitchhiking, or most cheaply, riding window-seat on an un-airconditioned busses.
During the previous day, I had returned from my hikes around Bajos del Toro and now found myself loitering in Ciudad Quesada, which would then lead me to La Fortuna. Thanks to the generosity of two men in a white pickup truck that lent me a hand while I was hitchhiking, I made stellar time.
Bus Route
The drive to La Fortuna was unique because it was my first time seeing the sun all day. My bus rose high into old farmlands where the mountains curve softly on terraced fields to prevent erosion. I imagine those hills and mountains are quite the challenge for tractors, especially since the tropics tend to fight back with a vengeance. Wild growth was making a play everywhere I looked.
I’ve really only seen Costa Rica in an overcast, so watching it in sunlight is a mind-shifting experience. Bright greens that make up the land become practically neon in direct sunlight. Most of the houses out this direction are white-painted cinderblocks with red sheet metal roofs. The nicest stand-alone houses are the ones perched on gentle slopes without bars on their windows and an adobe layer covering their walls.
La Fortuna
I finally arrived in La Fortuna and struggled for a swift few minutes trying to find my hotel through the Airbnb app.
One of the recurring navigation issues in Costa Rica is that many of the roads were only given names and numbers a decade or so ago. As a result, the system is somewhat spotty.
I spent a fair amount of time on the wrong side of town until my host provided me longitude and latitude coordinates. I arrived at my residence, Iguana Jardin (Iguana Garden) to find my nicest residence since I arrived. I had an entire kitchen and sitting room, two bedrooms and a balcony that looked directly at the Arenal Volcano, a Mt. Fuji-like cone majesty often ringed in a slim halo of clouds. Photos simply don’t do it justice.
The rest of my day was spent exploring La Fortuna. I’d been expecting something similar to Monteverde, a type of adventure-ski village, but La Fortuna is more of a typical gridded Central American town with a lot of people walking around.
Fairly small, the vast majority of people here are young adventure tourists, and I kept spotting the same faces over and over again. I wandered around Parque de La Fortuna for most of my solo time. It’s a nice little area, but there’s nothing about it I would call exceptional.
There are a few restaurants of note around the Plaza area. Lava Rocks Café is slightly on the pricey side, but their Palm Heart Salad is amazing. Rain Forest, a small breakfast café serves pretty good food and has some unique coffee options, such as the Crazy Monkey (Mono Loco) which is evaporated milk, coffee, bananas and cinnamon.
The place that really takes the prize is Chocolate Fusion. With a pantheon of traditional pastries, specialty drinks, novelty chocolates and great toasted sandwiches, I ended up eating here thrice in my limited time. There are also some interesting little art galleries scattered around, including Galeria Onirica, Galeria Estudio La Fortuna and the Wood and Art Gallery much further south.
The Volcanos Sought
Battered and sleepy from all my traveling, I made full use of my lodgings and spent an evening watching TV and booking a tour for tomorrow. My main purpose in visiting La Fortuna was to visit Rio Celeste, a volcanic vent river of an unusual hue located in Parque Nacional Volcan Tenorio.
However, my luck was spotty. Most tours around La Fortuna are a pretty heft sum, breaching the $100 dollar mark for a half-day hike. Information on buses was not promising and involved a lot of vague walking directions for two or three hours at a time.
I eventually found a tour with a company called Arenal Evergreen, advertised at $50 USD. Realistically, they charge an extra fifteen dollars for lunch and entry into the park, but I decided to bite the bullet.
The next morning I got my second breakfast at Rain Forest and waited outside my lodgings for my shuttle. There was an embarrassing hiccup where a shuttle did arrive right on time, but it turned out to be for my neighbors heading to the airport. My personal shuttle, loaded with nine other people, arrived about ten minutes later after my translation app and limited Spanish had maxed out their confusion.
A Jungle Tour
I generally dislike tours, since I’d rather enjoy trips at my own pace, but this one was quite good. I met a young American man named Johnson from Philly with a striking profile and golden earning glinting as he looked around with his camera. An Irish lass from Dublin named Freya kept the two of us company as well.
We rocketed towards the park, which took a little over an hour of driving. Once inside, yawning from the altitude change, our tour guide did a fairly good job describing the history of the park. Walking through the park was an additional treat, since we spotted more active wildlife than I had seen anywhere else in Costa Rica.
Aside from the usual flocks of parakeets and other types of birds, we were treated to a whole array of animals. Roughly twenty capuchin monkeys stayed overhead of our group for a few minutes, causing everyone to shuffle around, torn between their desire for good photos and the risk of getting peed on by any of the critters.
Further along, the mountain suddenly exploded at us, a half dozen howler monkeys hooting. We saw vivid blue beetles skittering on the ground and a tiny serpent that matched with it’s tree perfectly, camouflaged and coiled in on itself.
The Neon Waterfall
However, Parque Nacional Volcan Tenorio has one feature that demands attention beyond all others. The Rio Celeste Waterfall is an enormous white tumble of liquid crashing into an unreal blue pool at the base. The color is a bizarre neon blue and the sheer force of water creates a white, misty haze to frame the entire spectacle. Getting to the waterfall is a pretty steep, but well-maintained and non-slip staircase where tourists clog the steps.
I should know. I was that tourist for a good minute and a half.
Now, the color of Rio Celeste was something of a misinformation spectacle. Previous hypothesis though the color was a combination of Calcium Carbonate and Sulfur intermixing in the water, both chemicals caused by the thermal volcanic vents that dot the area.
However, Calcium Carbonate, as evidenced by the Jiuzhaigou National Park in Sichuan, China tends to coast organic substances (such as logs) in thick layers of white crust once they’re submerged. Rio Celeste has a different cause for color.
The volcanic springs instead produce high concentrations of Aluminosilicate Particles. By themselves, these are too small to cause any color changes, but once exposed to lower PH levels at other volcanic vents, they expand to over 500 nanometers and create a unique effect known as Mie Scattering. Hence, a striking neon blue color is reveled. However, since this is still pretty intense volcanic-chemical and thermal water, I didn’t see any fish swimming around the park.
Around the Thermal Lands
Other sights on this hike included the place where the water actually alters hues, an overlook at the Tenorio Volcano, a placid neon blue lagoon called Laguna Azul, and set of small thermal vents known as Los Hervideros. The smell of sulfur around these vents was intense. Before we left the park, everyone stopped to buy some fresh coconuts for 1000 Colones, where a man with a machete provided straws and a chip off the side of the coconut to scoop out the fruit’s flesh when we were done drinking.
Following the end of our hike, our tour group stopped at an enormous tree and a restaurant so far off the beaten path, I can’t find the name online. However, the food was good, the meal was pre-arranged and I got to drink an unholy amount of pineapple juice. This restaurant had a thin muddy trail leading back to the waters of Rio Celeste after they left the national park and we were allowed to swim in the chilly, fast-moving river.
Naturally, I soaked my last pair of clean pants doing this and blinded the rest of my tour group with my uber-pale skin, but it was still fun.
Return to La Fortuna
Back in La Fortuna, we got nailed by a short, intense rainstorm. Our tour guide dropped us off and Johnson and Freya opted to hop off the shuttle with me.
We planned to put our stuff at my apartment while making a rush visit to the Sloth Watching Trail, La Fortuna Arenal Volcano Private Trail. This is about a fifteen minute walk outside of downtown Fortuna and Freya desperately wanted to see a sloth before she left the country.
We entered right on the razor’s edge in terms of light and closing time, but the staff were enormously accommodating. They took us directly to a sloth hunkered in a tree, peering dedicatedly into the canopy.
Apparently, sloths like to hang around the mid-upper portion of thinner trees, about two-thirds of the way up. Two of the guides brought umbrellas and one a specialized angled monoscope for viewing the critter in the rain. A third guide kept an eye on the ground to make sure we wouldn’t have any problems with snakes, which are something of an evening issue in Costa Rica. Freya was pretty thrilled with the entire experience and I was happy to see the little creature hunkered down.
We spent the rest of our evening relaxing. I recommended we lounge in Chocolate Fusion Café where we spent the rest of our evening swapping travel stories until night fell. I cut through a park on my way home and that’s all she wrote.
A Last Minute Morning
The next day, I got myself a hearty breakfast with Johnson, a final walk around town and a quick peek at some of the area’s art galleries. Then, my bus was leaving and Johnson’s tour was heading out. We said a couple of goodbyes and headed out.
Now, my original plan was to hike through the cloud forests back to Monteverde and catch a bus home from there. Unfortunately, my through-jungle guide wasn’t able to make it, so the tour was canceled. I was feeling pretty sluggish by this point, so I didn’t really mind. I’ve already been to Monteverde anyway.
Instead, I hopped on a bus back to San José and ground my teeth as we got lodged in five and a half hours of typical traffic. Walking aroudn San José at night makes me a bit nervous, so I kept my steps swift until I was safely home.
I still have a couple more trips around Costa Rica planned. I’m currently on my last week in country, so wish me luck. Until then,
Best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written July 28th, 2021
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The GoPro Hero Black is my go to Action camera. I’m not comfortable bringing my cell phone to many wet and rugged locations, so the GoPro does most of my photographic heavy-lifting. The only things I bring in my GoPro kit are the camera, a spare battery and the forehead mount. I upgrade my GoPro once every two years. It was particularly excellent to have during my aquatic tour of Belize.
