After Santa Elena, my friend I traveled by jeep-boat-jeep to La Fortuna in Costa Rica during our Middle America trip in 2010. The reason we chose this touristic means of transportation rather than the public bus, was the amount of travel time it would take by bus. The bus would’ve taken 7 hours even though the two towns are quite close to each other.

La Fortuna would be the base for us to explore Arenal Volcano, or so we thought.. More about that later. Arenal Volcano was dormant for many years until it erupted in 1968. Since then it has been slightly active and explosions would occur occasionally.

Hostel Tip: Gringo Pete’s

When we left Santa Elena the weather looked like this (which in our minds was slightly hopeful).

But when we reached La Fortuna all hope was lost because it had actually started raining and there was a fog in the mountains as you can see in the below picture.

Luckily, we did not have to run around town in the rain because we had already booked our hostel: Gringo Pete’s. We based this booking on the Lonely Planet guide and we were not disappointed. It had such a nice atmosphere and the owner and his wife were very funny and friendly people. We spend most of our days there because it was raining so much we couldn’t go anywhere else.

Luckily, they had a cute little dog we could play with and there were a lot of fun people staying at that hostel.

Arenal Volcano Hike

We asked Pete whether it would be worth doing the volcano hike with limited visibility due to the clouds and the rain. He answered us in a very Southern American accent that one thing’s for sure: We would definitely not see anything if we wouldn’t go. So we decided he was right and since we were next to the volcano we might as well go.

A decision we would regret a little bit. We were not prepared at all. Everyone came on the tour with rain coats, proper hiking boots and head lights – it was an early evening hike to see the lava. We, on the other hand, arrived with a shirt, long trousers and Converse shoes. Luckily, the tour guide found us a flash light and one of those thin throwaway ponchos, but still the Converse didn’t help us in terms of grip on the ground of the forest.

When we went up it was still slightly light out. The guide warned us not to grab any tree trunks and to always watch our steps because there are venomous snakes and dangerous spiders in the forests. At the start we heeded his words, but when we started gliding all over the place we gripped the trees in order not to fall all the way down. I thought it was a very difficult trek as I’m not experienced in clambering through forests. Not to mention that we had to take the same route down in the dark. We fell behind our well prepared group quite often but we managed to make it to the top.

The worst was that when we arrived at the top of our viewpoint after two hours we saw this:

Baldi Hot Springs
After a two hour descent we definitely felt like we deserved the next part of the tour, namely the Baldi Hot Springs. It was dark and slightly chilly so it was great to heat up in the hot springs. The water actually originates from the volcano, so even though we didn’t see the volcano when we were standing right next to it, we could benefit from its warmth.

The tour offered by Get Your Guide is similar to the one we did back in the day, only we did ours at night.

Conclusion

I’m sure La Fortuna and Arenal are great stops on any vacation to Costa Rica but only when the weather is good. When it isn’t I will be so bold to say that you might as well skip it. It’s slightly out of the way and the main activities revolve around spending time around the volcano. Our next stop was a Cano Negro tour which I will describe in the next post.

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