Rincon de La Vieja and Dancing All Night

Today was action packed. We had a great geological experience, right in the heart of volcano country. Brooke suggested a tour through really cool volcanic vents at the national park Rincon de La Vieja. There were fumerolas, a volcanito, a waterfall, mud pots, water pots, and a fumarolic lagoon! In English, this was bubbling mud, bubbling water, a few steam vents, and a waterfall. It was an incredibly interesting and stinky place to walk around. One vent looked like pure boiling sulphur and it stunk like it too. You can’t put that on film or video but if I could you’d be smelling rotton eggs right now – oooooh. We basically had the whole park to ourselves except when a group of elderly French tourists all came down one of the steepest, mudiest trails in the whole place. Some of them had dress shoes on – their tour guide sucked I think. The trail was a loop so it was far better to go up this steep muddy bit and follow the trail around. It’s only 3km and they must have hiked over 1.5km to get to the main attraction. The trail even suggests going the way we went yet their guide insisted on taking them the wrong way round. We had fun being able to say “bonjour” and “au revoir” along with a little bit of “comment ca va?”.

We got back to the hotel, washed up, and went to a movie at the local “cinne-mas”. An entertaining couple from the states ran it. It was a little commercial space that had been transformed into a makeshift theater. It was a nice little home theater basically with about 8 rows of theater seats about 5 wide. So, you could theoretically put 40 people in there but we were the only ones. We picked our own flick from their index and they had beer, wine and popcorn for us. All in, we spent about $20 on a private showing – it was great!

After our theater experience, we hit a cool bar for a drink; my Grey Goose martini was fantastically smooth. We continued down to the local nightclub where the $4 cover entitled you to an open bar. It did take us a good 10 minutes to get a drink. So we tipped the bartender well to give us doubles – quick thinking. The DJ was subpar but the dancing and the crowd was just fine. We danced into the morning, something that we now try to do on every trip we go on. It’s just so much fun.

Costa Rica view of our day trip.


Close up of where we drove to get to Rincon de La Vieja.


Some of the traffic we had to pass.


The rangers station.


We were walking the right hand loop.


Satellite view of our hike. I used my GPS watch to track our walk.






















































































Too many men for one little truck.



A movie to start the evening.


Drinks before going out.


Brooke and Cory at the club.