Costa Rica part I: Arenal Volcano

Hello all! I have returned from Costa Rica! DanT and I made it home on Monday at 1 AM. We are doing great and had an amazing time but took too many pictures! Yes, it is possible! We took about 900 pictures. We filled the 4 GB card bought for this trip and had to use about half of the 2 GB backup card that we brought. Due to the 900 pictures we took, this will be a post of pictures covering our first Costa Rican destination, the Arenal volcano. All the pictures are in chronological order, just for reference...

Post early morning flight, after arriving at our first hotel, this is me - asleep - in the hotel lobby.

Yeah, that's one of the top 10 most active volcanoes in the world. Our hotel faced it.

Hotel room "waterfall" shower. See me dancing? That's how tired I was.

Part of our daily breakfasts. Amazing tropical fruit!

Enjoying a truly local banana

Along with fresh fruit every day we had the national dish (which happens to be vegan): Gallo Pinto, or spotted rooster. It is a beans and rice dish. The black beans speckle the rice which is where the name comes from. It's really a filling, fantastic way to start the day. This was an excellent, energy filled breakfast. We tended to hike in the mornings, as it is Costa Rica's green season and it rains pretty much every afternoon. It was sunny almost every morning, however, so hike we did!

Hummingbird. Perching. Apparently they do that.

Look what we found right at the entrance of our La Fortuna waterfall hike.

A nest with two eggs in it! According to our guide this is the nest of the national bird. A small brown bird with a beautiful song.

La Fortuna waterfall. Beautiful

Fish in the river. Look how clear!

River and forest. Pretty much all of Costa Rica looks like that.

Teeny lizard

Beautiful lizard at the exit of the park

On the way home our guide spotted this howler monkey and his family climbing the electric wires and a nearby tree.

The real thing on the tree. Bananas grow like weeds in Costa Rica.

And in the backyard of our room, cows and bulls enjoying grasses taller than me.

It looks like a postcard!

DanT and I getting ready for our hike of the volcano. Awww, so cute...

Probably the greatest picture of me ever. Apparently I was thirsty (that's the mouthpiece of our camelback).

View from as high up on the volcano as we were allowed to go.

Those black rocks you see at the bottom are dried lava from the big explosion of Arenal in 1968. Since then, this volcano has been consistently active, but not deadly (except to the stupid people who want to look into it and fall in. Seriously, don't do it...)

Our last morning in Arenal, two sparrows came to visit us at breakfast. I like to think the boy sparrow is chasing the girl.

And on to our next destination we go!

That is lake Arenal, and to get to Monteverde, our next destination, we had to cross it! Monteverde will be covered in my next post. Think cloud rain forest, high up in the mountains. Even more beautiful then Arenal, if you can believe it! Thanks for your patience with all the pictures, but we took 900, so I promise this doesn't even scratch the surface. More next time!