The Mysterious Volcan Arenal

We woke up and headed to Cafe Milagro for breakfast in Manuel Antonio.  Cafe Milagro is an American style cafe where you could actually get free refills on coffee!  They even roast their own.  After breakfast, we promptly got on the road to Arenal Volcano and the town of La Fortuna.  On the way up, we finally stopped at our first souvenir shop. It was a cozy hut on the side of the road.  Meredith picked up a wooden salad bowl set for very little.

Once in La Fortuna, we tried to stay at the highly recommended hostel Gringo Pete's, but we missed the last private room by 20 minutes.  We took a look around and saw the only toucan that we saw the entire trip there.  Unfortunately, it was in a cage. We found an okay room at the La Choza Inn, which we later found means "hut" or "shack."  We failed to ask if there was hot water and sadly discovered that they don't have it.

We checked in, dropped our stuff off and promptly bought passes to a nearby hotspring called Badli.  We went for dinner at a restaurant called Vagabond because Meredith was craving pizza.  There is pizza and Italian food everywhere in Costa Rica.  After a good, but expensive by Costa Rican standards, dinner, we headed to Baldi Hot Springs around 7:30 pm.

Baldi has 13 hot springs of varying temperatures.  There is a more famous hot spring called Tabacon but it is a bit expensive ($45!), so we opted for Baldi instead.  The pools ranged in temperature from "cold" (like a plain swimming pool) to 152 degrees!  There are jacuzzis and two swim-up bar areas.  Since it was so late, we essentially had the place to ourselves, which made the experience even better.  Curt jumped full body into one pool that claimed to be 113 degrees, but it was probably 123, and he quickly jumped out without even touching the ground, it seemed.  We went in just about every pool.  To get to the largest pool with four waterfalls and a random pyramid, we had to walk through a cool series of paths that wound through a thick garden.  It was like walking through a secret garden.

We headed home around 10 pm and that's when we were sad to discover La Choza Inn had cold showers.

We decided to get up early the next morning and to do a zipline tour. It was drizzling, but we had a great time.  The advantage of the rain is that we got to go even faster on the ziplines!  After a quick demonstration, we were off..  There were 11 cables.