To La Fortuna

Written 01.13.2009

We were able to secure a cheap(ish) transport to our next destination, the small town of La Fortuna departing Tamarindo yesterday, Monday the 12th at 2pm. A small van picked us up at Tamarindo Backpackers (which despite the nice white lab Diego was getting a little old) and took us on a 4-hour trip back into the heart of the country, towards the active Arenal Volcano. The ride was fine, and relatively quick considering the distance and terrain. Our driver was used to every twist and turn of the road winding around Lake Arenal, as evidenced by the fact that he accelerated through every one - crossing lanes, tossing us around in our bench seat and generally making me carsick for two of the four hours of transit. The scenery was gorgeous, winding first into the hills of the central plains, then around the previously mentioned Lake Arenal, then the slow climb into the foothills of the volcano. Our driver was very nice, and offered a few brief stops at lookout points over the lake, a pause by some trees with a family of monkeys (which he taunted until the dominant male howled back at us), and some small raccoon-looking animals that pour out of the forest when cars drive by looking for handouts. There are apparently toucans, jaguars, sloths, and a few other species of monkey around, but I’ve seen no evidence of that. La Fortuna proper is a small town with a main street consisting of mostly food shops, tourist sales offices and a large park in front of their church. The big draws here are the volcano, the dense rainforest, and the hot springs that are the result of the active volcano. The place we are staying while here is called Gringo Pete’s - a small glass shop converted into a hostel that now houses between fifteen and twenty travelers at a time. It is cheap, for sure, ($4 or $5 a night per person, the latter price if you have a bathroom ensuite) but it is a little more like “roughing it” than our previous stops. They don‘t have internet connectivity here, no TV, a communal kitchen that is perpetually plagued with fruit flies, ants and whatever else wanders in, as well as a diverse crowd of people ranging in age from (seemingly) 18 to 60, in nationality from Swiss to “perpetual wanderer,” and in temperament from normal to bat-shit crazy. When we arrived around 6pm they had only two beds left in the place, both located in the “back dorm.” The “back dorm” is essentially a small open-air wooden shack with bunk beds stacked three high, attached to a bathroom with a toilet and a cold shower. The only real issue with this scenario is that this is malaria country and open-air sleeping is a little worrisome. It turned out to not be that bad, we slathered up with bug repellant and slept under our sheets to very little ill effect. The following day we had the chance to move to room on the interior of the compound, and a private room at that. We have some space to put our stuff, and a door for which only we have the key. We have a shared bathroom/shower, but to me its worth it to have a small space of your own when you need it. We went into town this morning to get some breakfast, and settled on a 24-hour place that has cheap local food (we had the Desayuno Tipico, the “typical breakfast,” consisting of rice and beans, eggs, a tortilla, fried sweet plantain, coffee and orange juice) for a budget-friendly $6 combined. We also stopped by the market, the Super La Fortuna, to pick up some ingredients for some home-cooked meals over the next couple days - some rice, beans, canned tomato, orange juice, corn flakes and milk. So there’s the scene for now, we’ll have some more later today after a little excursion to the waterfall and some more time to look around town.

On a semi-related note, I think we’re going to try and set up a folder of pictures for each post, or maybe for each location - the formatting gets a little funky when we try and post more than one picture per post, and I don’t want to take the time to fiddle with the html code and worry about browser compatibility and all that, so look for a link in posts to come or maybe on the sidebar. I hope to have the folders labeled well so you can browse accordingly - resized to avoid huge file sizes and provide ease of browsing.