This weekend, a group of friends and I went to see Arenal Volcano and have a little adventurous weekend. Maddie, Cameron, Beth, Adam, DeAnna, and me left for Arenal Friday morning at 6:00 am! It was definitely hard to get out of bed that morning, but somehow we all did it and made it to the bus in plenty of time. After a 4 1/2 hour bus ride to Arenal, DeAnna and I were pretty tired and hot, so we decided to stay at the hotel and go swimming while the others explored the small town. It felt so great to be in that very cold pool! Our hostel that we stayed at was actually really nice. The grounds were beautiful and the rooms clean. I was quite impressed.
We didn't have much time to swim and hang out at the hostel though since we were signed up for a canopy tour at 1:00. They came and picked us up and we headed toward the volcano. We had a great view of it and were very fortunate that the fog had lifted so we could actually see the top.
The canopy tour consisted of 11 zip lines and took us just over 2 hours to complete. We "zipped" over the tops of the trees in the rain forest and only got hit by overhanging foliage a few times. The first time down the zip line was quite an adrenaline rush, but once I decided that I wasn't going to die and that it was actually quite fun, I was able to enjoy the other 10 lines. Some were faster than others, and one I actually almost ran into the tree at the end of the line, but luckily the guide stopped me before. Sadly we didn't see any wildlife, but it was alot of fun. It started raining a bit while we were on the tour - but what could we really expect - it's called a RAINforest afterall. The rain actually felt quite refreshing and it made us go faster on the different lines so we quite enjoyed it! The last leg of the canopy tour was a cliff we had to repel down. I was glad I had gone repelling before or I would have been more scared than I was. It was a LONG repel. I quite enjoyed it - but a few of my friends vowed to never do it again after. Haha!
After our ziplining was over, we rode horses back to the pick up point so we could be taken back to our hostel. All the horses wanted to be first, so when one horse would start running to get ahead of another horse, the rest would follow. By the end, however, we couldn't make the horses go fast if we had wanted to - they were all pretty worn out.
One funny story while horse back riding. Our guide had to stop to help someone's horse who's reins had come loose. He got off his own horse and was helping the person, when his own horse took off up the hill. I was in the front since my horse didn't want to stop. I heard all my friends yelling "stop the horse!" I did my best cowboy imitation and reached out to the run away horse as it passed me and I actually grabbed the reins!!! I was very impressed with myself! Haha!
After our canopy tour, we were all in need of a good swim, so that's exactly what we did. The sun had gone behind the clouds, however, so our swim didn't last too long because it was WAY too cold! So we all got cleaned up, went out to eat, then came back and played BS and Phase 10 at the bar since it was POURING rain which meant our lava tour was out of the question (you couldn't see the base of the volcano let alone the peak). Thanks to some fancy card work by yours truly, DeAnna and I tied for first place in our 2 hour game of Phase 10!
We were hoping for better weather the next morning, but sadly we woke to more rain and even more fog. I wouldn't have known there was a volcano nearby if I hadn't seen it the day before. We were quite bummed. But, instead of crying about it - we walked around the little town, visited the church, and went into all the little shops. Arenal is a very touristy place, but it was fun to just hang out there that morning.
We all opted to tak the earlier 12:45 bus back to San Jose since the weather was so bad. When we got to the bus station, we were approached by a bus driver saying that his bus would get us back to San Jose an hour quicker and all we had to do was switch buses in San Ramon. We fell for it and hopped on the bus. The bus wasn't in the best of shape and we started to worry if we had made the wrong decision.
We REALLY began to worry when we started going through the most random areas of Costa Rica and then proceeded to drive around the block of a residential area picking people up at their houses. We though forsure we were going to be sold into slavery or something. But, we decided to put these fears behind us, turn on our music, fall asleep, and hope to wake up in San Ramon. Well...long story short. We made it to San Ramon and consequently to San Jose - and indeed we were an hour earlier than we would have been had we taken the safer, less scenic route. It was a very interesting end to our adventurous weekend!
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