Monday, May 26, 2008

This Past Weekend

This past weekend was amazing! I traveled to see the Arenal Volcano on Friday. Very cool! This volcano is still active and I could hear it rumbling. We walked around to and saw a lot of volcanic rock that was left from the last eruption in 1968. The last eruption destroyed much of the Arenal National Park and it is now starting to regrow.

Friday night, the group went to Baldi Hot Springs. It had many different hot springs that ranged from around 90 degrees up to 152 degrees. VERY HOT!!! This was a very cool experience and very fun. There were bars in the springs and a huge slide in one of them. This slide did not feel good going down. On the second turn it sent you airborne and I felt like I was going to leave the structure and fly off in to God knows where. I landed in the slide luckily but hit my head on it. Apparently I missed the memo about putting your hands behind you head when going down the slide because my head hit the slide and it did not feel good. I was alright but did not go down again.
After the hot springs we ate a delicious dinner and headed back to our hotel. At the hotel the power had gone out on the entire street. This was actually a blessing in disguise. It made it very easy to see the lava spurting at the peak of the Arenal volcano. Its amazing to see something that powerful first hand. Sorry guys, camera wasn´t strong enough to get a good picture just trust me.

On Saturday, we woke up and headed off to the hydroelectric plant, not the most interesting part of the trip but they explained how this plant gives a majority of the power to Costa Rica because of their turbines that the water passes through.














After the power plant, we rode horses to the La Fortuna Waterfall, this was cool. My horse, Caballo, which I was told meant "no balls" was biting other horses and sweating a ton but in the end he got me where I needed to go.



At the waterfall, we hiked down the 16 flights of steep and slippery stairs to reach the falls. The water was cold, but it felt very good, it was a hot day. I tried swimming under the falls but my skills were no match for mother nature. We were not able to spend a ton of time there but it was worth it. The climb back up made me realize I was more out of shape than I thought.



After the falls we went to the volcano surrounding areas and walked along the molten rock. I saw a very cool plant there.




Sunday we went across a lake and headed to Monteverde on the bumpiest jeep ride of my life where we would see the rainforest and do canopy tours. I was unable to take any pics while I was doing the ziplining and doing what they call the "Tarzan Swing" because it was raining a lot. We were harnessed to cable and ziplined above the canopy hundreds of feet in the air. It was amazing. The Tarzan swing was pretty self explanatory. I jumped off of a platform and swung out into a valley once again getting a great view of the rainforest as well as nearly peeing my pants.







After the canopy we ate dinner and went on a night tour. There was not much out but I saw a few things like a tarantula, a frog, and bats. The rain really put a damper on our night.




The following morning we also went on a tour of the rainforest. I saw the national bird of Costa Rica, the Quetzal.


There was also a hummindbird area. There were so many of them but I didn't actually hear any of them hum...

This trip was very rainy, very long, but very worthwhile.