Aventuras!

We are now in La Fortuna, a small town next to a gently active volcano. Internet service is nearly impossible and I am on a Spanish speaking keyboard, so apologies upfront for typos, mostly in punctuation.

Our first full day in Santa Elena was nearly a disaster as it was too windy to do the ziplines - like crazy hurricane gusts! - so after we rode the shuttle for 30 minutes to the place, we waited around for another hour and were shuttled right back to our hotel. There´s not a lot to do in Santa Elena - it´s a tiny, tiny town that is mostly touristas exploring the cloudofrests and national parks nearby. Lots of restaurants and tourity souvenir shops, up in the hills and surrounded by towering exotc trees, it´s gorgoues but all we found to do was eat and walk around. I think we´re gaining weight.

Instead of ziplining, we explored a couple of exhibits, including a pretty cool frog exhibit, went to dinner, and were in bed watching videos on Beth´s computer by 9. Pretty lame. The hotel was right in town and was simple and clean, and supposedly had hot water although for some reason it only worked for Beth. (I had my first hot shower since I´ve been here this morning and that was an entertaining one as well... More on that later.) Also, we called it a suicide shower, as electrical cords were hooked directly to the showerhead. Yes, we have photos and they will be posted when we get back.

The roads were crazy - no sidewalks and crazy drivers who honk to let you know they´re about to zoom past you, quite close! We´re getting better at not getting run over and knowing where to look. Also, Costa Rica is on a very slow schedule - no one is in a hurry, and no one seems stressed out, so of course that´s hard for me... Or hard for Beth! Even getting into Santa Elena was an adventure - dirt roads for hours! And not fire roads, not nicely groomed dirt roads, but rocky, pitholey, no guardrail, shouldn´t be driving on these roads kind of dirt roads just to get to town! Town was paved, and between Santa Elena and Monteverde was sometimes paved sometimes not, and out of town is all crazy dirt roads. Bone jarring, cars have no shocks left kind of dirt roads. Very entertaining.

Yesterday it was windy and of course I was worried we weren´t ghoing ziplining again, but in fact they let us go! It was spectacular - I chose this one because they have the longest and fastest lines, and you don´t have to brake, the guides brake for you. It was SO MUCH FUN! Great photos and videos, but essentially you take a tram to the top, climb a staircase and hook into a cable. You are wearing a harness that goes around your waist and your legs (flattering), and you hang by your waist. To go faster you tuck into a ball (I did that a lot). The guide hooks you up and then sends you on your way - and you´re soaring above the canopy of the rainforst! It was insane - we were going so fast that you forget to look around you, but the view was increadible. We zipped from tower to tower, sometimes alone and sometimes in tanden, where the back person hookes their legs around the front person´s waist and you go screaming down the line even faster because you´re heavier...

I only got stuck once, when Beth pawned me off on a tiny woman who needed more weight to make it across. If you don´´t make it you have to turn around and pull yourself hand-over-hand to get back. Not fun. We got stuck, and I was displeased. Beth was my partner after that.

We have fabulous photos and some really funny videos that will certainly get posted once we return.

After the ziplining, we had to catch a 2PM transfer to La Fortuna. Because La Fortuna and Santa Elena are separated by either a really, really long drive around Arenal Lake, or you can take a Jeep-Boat-Jeep, where you hop into what we thought would be a jeep but was really a Toyota minivan (Mom, driving your Camry to the top of Saddleback was NOTHING compared to the abuse this van took!) and ride on a single lane dirt road (in some places so potholed that we had to slow to a crawl and make sure the back wheels went were they were supposed to... Exciting to say the least) through some gorgeous country. You could see how CR has been deforested and is now mostly pastureland, at least in the parts we were going through, but the pastures were all bordered by a string of remaining rainforest so you could get a sense for how the steeply rolling hills looked back in the day. I think there are a lot of happy cows and horses out here though.

Once we reached the lake, we boarded a flat boat with a bunch of other people and rode for about 45 minutes to the other side, right near the Arenal Volcano. (Yes, photos to follow!) There, we were picked up by another van, who shuttled us to our hotel.

Well, what we thought would be our hotel.

In a new phase of travel for me, we arrived sans booking. How brave of me! I never travel like that! It was great fun until the hotel we wanted was - gasp! - booked solid. It IS the new year and all (how could we miss that?!). The lovely woman at the counter took pity on our sweaty greasy souls and made a few phone calls and found us a room at her friends hotel for a mere $40 a night. Now, $40 a night is not much, and I have to admit I had a little panic attack. But the proprietress picked us up in her SUV, elderly mother in tow, and drove us back to her place. Her name is Daisy, she speaks very little English, and is our new best friend. The place is cheap because it´s 400 meters out of town and they are building new units, so there´s construction during the day. The units are stunning - there is a main walkway that separates little cabinas, each with its own private porch, and the walkway has a direct view of the volcano. Private bathroom and hot water and air conditioning - all for $40 a night?! Okay, it is a dirt driveway, and the construction is actually right outside of our bathroom, but who cares?! Daisy explained that on a clear night you can see the lava. We haven´t had a clear night yet but we´re hoping...

Anyway, we arrive around 6, and she immediately helps us book a canyoneering expedition for tomorrow (hiking through rivers! Rapelling down waterfalls! I want to live here!), and helped Beth book an immediate massage as her neck had kinked and she was in tons of pain and could hardly move.

Then, Daisyt threw us back in the car and took us to her massage lady, whoc beat Beth´s neck into submission and gave me a list of muscle relaxers to get at the Farmacia, so that was exciting for me. I bought ten and came back rather proud of my use of Spanish to procure the goods, and the massage lady laughed really hard while trying to explain that I really onlt needed to buy uno each. Apparently you don´t have to buy the WHOLE pack of pills, you can buy them indiviudually. Who knew?

So we went to a lovely dinner and retired to our cabina, where there is a lovely gato that is Beth´s new best friend (we saved it from the perrito that was chasing it around) that she has named Danger Paws Shithead (Shithead pronounced as in Freakonomics - SHI-thead). Made us laugh.

This morning I had my first hot shower since we´ve been here, but the windows in the bathroom own onto the construction site behind us. Granted, they are high up, like way taller than me, and they have angled wooden slats, so if you stand in the right place you can´t see in or out, but they don´t close, so I could see and hear the two guys who were working on the bungalows behind us this morning quite well. I figured out that if I stayed up against the wall in one of the corners I could stay out of sight (mostly they weren´t there, but just in case), but the water would reach that corner. However, there was a very low bathtub spout, even though this was clearly a shower. The spout was about knee height, so I finally broke down and showered kind of like a seal using the bathtub spout. Not ideal, but an excellent shower none-the-less. And hot!

We walked into town and Beth is on massage number two while I update the world. Then, we are off to lunch, and then a volcano-heated natural hot springs hot springs for their therapeutic powers, then maybe some lava viewing to ring in the new year, perhaps with some Californian ladies we met while ziplining (Sophie and Lisa, engineers from San Jose of all places!). Tomorrow is canyoneering (SO excited!), then who knows what, then on the 2nd we fly to Tambor for our Pacific beach adventures. We don´t have reservations for a hotel yet, but guess what we´re doing over lunch today?

Miss you all! We of course have no phone or internet in our hotel so I´m trying to work with internet cafes and pay phones at the moment. Be patient.