Arenal

The main attraction (The Volcano - Arenal) almost eluded us this weekend. It's been active, to one degree or another, for several decades... And we wanted a good look. You can't really tell, but there's a volcano hiding in those clouds. The rain for the night before left La Fortuna with a pretty heavy cloud cover the next morning.

This is what that same scene looked like the day before (before we shot off to the other hike and the waterfall). We had actually planned on doing both volcanos the first day, but we changed our plans when the first one took so long, and tired us out, and then the rain came. Our hope was to do Arenal Sunday morning before returning to Tamarindo.

But, well - clouds make looking at lava on a volcano difficult. So, what to do? Window shop of course: kill time! And what do you know - it worked.... An hour later, things cleared up - some. And we decided it was worth a try.

This volcano is a lot more active (and larger) than the volcano in Guatemala, but not nearly as exciting, since you can't see the lava from the base! On the other hand, what Arenal has is massive lava flows and an impressive history. Although we didn't get to see "frash" lava, we could hear it "breathing" and we saw numberous boulders roll down the side bouncing as they went. Amazing!

We hiked a path that (15 years ago) was destroyed by lava. And well - they make it very clear that there's always a dangerous unpredictablity about volcanos!

Really?