Day 2 : the Arenal area

We awoke with the sun, which came up around 5:30am. Since we had gone to bed early, this was no big deal anyway, and we continued this sleep schedule throughout the trip. Since it is almost certain to rain in the afternoon, it was best to make the most of the dry morning weather.

We had breakfast at the same restaurant where we had eaten the night before, as it was included with our hotel bill. We discovered the basics of Costa Rican breakfast. Coffee is made with a wooden tower holding a cloth coffee filter placed above a coffee pot, a pot of boiling water is then poured into the filter and you get a nice rich drip brew. (I found out later this is called a chorreador.)




Breakfast was eggs with gallo pinto, which is a mix of black beans, rice, cilantro, and few peppers, usually molded into a little mountain on the plate. That morning we also had our choice of fried cheese or regular cheese - the cheese was a lot like the mennonite cheese from Mexico, very tasty. (Update: I later learned the reason it resembles Mennonite cheese is because it is Mennonite cheese.) We had seen people selling this cheese along the side of the road the previous day, so it was nice to have the chance to find out what it was like.

We left la Fortuna and started on our way to El Castillo, on the opposite side of the Arenal volcano. It was only about 20 kilometers away, but after we left the highway, we had about 6 miles of rough, rutted dirt road, so it took us quite a while before we made it to El Castillo. The weather was beautiful that morning, and the volcano looked stunning the whole way there.

We arrived at the village of El Castillo around 10:30 am, and went to our hotel Las Cabinitas. The cabin was ready for us, so we checked in and then walked to the Butterfly Conservatory that was near the hotel.

We had a wonderful time there. We had varying degrees of success photographing the butterflies. The most beautiful butterfly of all is the blue morpho, and they had hundreds of them. However, they never left their wings open when they were stopped, and they flew too fast to be photographed with their wings clearly exposed.

The conservatory also had a frog exhibit, and we got a chance to wake up a sleeping red-eyed tree frog.

After our visit, we headed west of El Castillo to visit El Rancho Margot, a self-sustaining ("off the grid") ranch / tourist lodge. We had a nice meal there, and then hung out on their patio bar chatting with several of the people who worked there. One was from France, and he specialized in taking people on jungle hikes through some of the most primitive parts of the Costa Rican jungle. Hard core super-experienced jungle hiking freak, it was fun finding out about all that.

When we left, we checked out the road that continued farther west, where there was a river crossing, and found a couple of guys from New York who had just driven from a coastal town on the Guanacaste peninsula, and were trying to figure out if they could make it through the water crossing of the road. We did not have a clue, but I decided to photograph them as they went across in order to record for posterity the success or failure of the crossing.















It started raining that evening, and we spent most of the time in our hotel's restaurant, since our cabin did not have enough light for reading. We then sat outside our cabin, shielded from the rain by the overhang of the roof, drinking rum and looking at the occasional red flashes and streaming lights of falling ejecta from the volcano. The view of Arenal was obscured by the mists and we were a little disappointed not to see the nighttime eruptions of the volcano that we were expecting. Fortunately the next evening was different.