Volcano - Can Anyone See the Lava?

Canyoning at La Fortuna
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Next stop La Fortuna, a small town at the base of the Arenal Volcano.  Personally I have never quite understood why you would populate an area at the base of an active volcano but it is very stunning and I am told that there is little chance of a huge eruption as there is activity every day that therefore keeps it stable.

With this in mind we took off on a nature trail on the slopes and spotted quite a few spider monkeys.  This was followed by a somewhat strange "pizza eating in the rain" scenario whilst trying to look for lava coming out of the top of the volcano - in the cloud - not the most successful of our activities!  We followed this however with a trip to some wonderfully relaxing hot springs which more than made up for it.

Poisonous Dart Frog
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The next day we checked out some of the local canyons with the help of some ropes - technically this is like abseiling but it wasn't dangerous (honest) - the hardest bit was walking through the water without slipping on the rocks.  It was great fun and a bit of an adrenaline rush.  We had a great local lunch and our guide found us a poisonous dart frog to check out which apparently some people lick in order to hallucinate - we decided not to give it a try!  In the afternoon we thought we would chill out at the bottom of the local waterfall which was spectacular and freezing but no-one had warned us there were 484 steps to it....  we were a bit sore after walking back up!