Mi Hermana y Mi Amiga

Chelsey and I at the airport
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After going for breakfast with Johanna in Granada, I went back to the hotel, packed my stuff, and said goodbye to everyone, including Hiroto. Him and Ule were going to Isla de Ometepe on Lake Nicaragua, and I would have gone with them if I didn't have to be in Costa Rica. I walked across town with my stuff to find the TransNica bus station, but when I got there I was told that the bus was full and I was out of luck. So I walked back across town to TicaBus, and thankfully they had a few seats left. While I waited a few hours for the bus I met an American girl who was living in San Jose, and was in Nicaragua to get her visa extended. She had a bad time in Managua, but we went for a walk around Granada while we were waiting, I think it changed her opinion of Nicaragua a bit, capital cities are never nice in this part of the world. The border crossing into Costa Rica went fine, but we had to stand in lineup after lineup and it took around 2 hours to cross. But I got another stamp, so it was all ok. 5 hours later I got to San Jose, and took a cab to Hostel Pangea, in downtown San Jose. I bargained with the cab drivers outside the bus terminal to get a decent price, I got them down from 9000C to 3000C. On the way I told my cab driver I needed to stop at an ATM, so when we got to the hostel and I gave him a 5000C bill, he'd only give me 1000C back, because he "had to go way out of his way to find an ATM." Yeah right. They're on every street corner here. But he refused to give back my change and just got back in his cab.

The waterfall and swimming hole
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Costa Rica has some really nice hostels, this one I was staying at had a swimming pool, bar, restaurant, etc. It was more like a resort than a hostel. The night I was talking to Kristen on MSN about when her flight got in the next day, when she realized that she told me the day she was departing, the 6th, and she was actually arriving on the 7th. Oops, so now suddenly I had an extra day to kill in San Jose. I spent the next day downtown checking out the city, did some shopping and saw a movie. San Jose, and Costa Rica in general, reminds me a lot of somewhere like California, more than anywhere else I've been in Central America. It felt like being back in somewhere like the States. I went to bed early that night because I had to get up at 4am to catch a shuttle to the airport to meet Kristen and Chelsey at 5:30am.

"Dos!"

Kristen and Chelsey at the falls
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Their flight was on time, and after saying hello the 3 of us walked out of the airport and caught a public bus back to downtown. We rode the bus for about 30min until the end of the line, and then caught a cab to San Carlos bus terminal where we would catch a bus to take us to La Fortuna. After we bought our bus ticket we went for breakfast, and Kristen and Chelsey got the typical rice and beans. Chelsey managed to order her meal in Spanish, but when it came time for Kristen to order she just pointed at Chelsey and said "Dos!", which just confused our waitress, who replied in english "Dos what?" Our bus ride to La Fortuna went well, even though it was only 5 hours it felt really long, probably because we had to stop every hundred meters or so to let people on and off the bus.

Beautiful view from the top
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Once we were in La Fortuna we walked to Arenal Backpacker's Hostel. Again it was a nice place with a pool and a big yard. Kristen and Chelsey are lucky, it seems like everyone here speaks english, unlike all the other countries I've visited so far. After dropping off our stuff we went for a walk around town and found a place to have dinner. Later that night we signed up for a Volcano view tour, that left at 8:00. We got in a van with a few other people and drove for 30min to a view point of the Volcano. This volcano is still very active, and its too dangerous to get close to, so we could just see the lava errupting from far away. It looked like little red fireworks in the distance, not as cool as roasting marshmellows over lava, but it was still cool to see it errupt. We spent the rest of the night in the pool, and then went to bed early because we had been up since 4am.

The next day we decided to go checkout a waterfall and swimming hole. The book said it was a difficult 7km hike all uphill to get there. So we decided to take a cab up, and then walk down, and we were glad we did it that way. In the cab on the ride up our driver wanted to practise his english, and said that I had to practise my spanish. So we talked the whole way, him speaking to me in english and me replying in spanish. The cab dropped us off at the entrance to the park, and we paid our fee and started to hike down to the waterfall. The hike down there wasn't long, it was just really steep, and the worst part was that we knew we'd have to come back up. It was all worth it though, the falls at the bottom were beautiful. We all went for a swim. I tried to swim through the falls, but that was a bad idea, I didn't even get close because the current was so strong, and I ended up just drinking a whole bunch of water. After we were done we started the walk back up, the "Stairmaster 5000" as the girls called it. From the top we walked 7kms back to our hostel. We met up with a big group of people and all went out for dinner together. The dinner was good but our waiter was kind of weird and kept telling Chelsey that she was eating dog meat, which kind of creeped her out a bit.

That night I wasn't feeling that good so I didn't go out, but I did walk the girls to a bar before I went to bed. I enjoyed La Fortuna, and the next morning we planned on going to Monteverde.