VOLCAN POAS AND  LA FORTUNA

 

 

Volcan Poas is the most accessible of the many volcanoes which form a semi-circle around San Jose. It rises to more than 8800 feet above sea level and nearly a mile above the highland plain that harbors the capital city.  The drive up from the plain is both beautiful and curious.  It is a primary tourist artery, that has driveway style roads which make you shake your head in wonder how visitor buses ever make it up this far.  Along the way, numerous roadside stands offer strawberries dipped in chocolate.  The view out over greater San Jose as you approach the top is stunning.

 

Once at the top in my newly obtained rental car, a walk beyond the visitor’s center leads to two craters.  The primary one is Volcan Poas itself.  It is huge, steamy, and inaccessible.  It still smokes from fuminoles in the fractured abyss of the crater floor at the perimeter of a milky lake dominating its center.  The other turquoise beauty (Laguna Botos) is found at the virtual peak of the volcano, a modest uphill hike through shaded pathways necessary to reach its pleasing view.  Those who have the time (or care to) can walk downhill a short distance to bathe in its pure waters.

 

I have rented a navigation system to go with the car, given language differences and differing methods of announcing intersections and directional signs in this part of the world.  The nav system artfully chooses to direct me, via the long and main route … which is to say, nearly back to San Jose and then north around the flank of Poas to the still-active Volcan Arenal and recreational area of La Fortuna.  A trip that normally takes three and one-half hours tops, stretches into five.  Arrival is just in time for directions and advice from a new tourist information office on the entry into town.  Dusk quickly ensues.  What to do at this time of the evening?

 

Baldi Hot Springs offers for $35 an all—day retreat to its 17 thermal heated pools.  Is four hours relaxation only in the evening worthwhile to make this bite from the wallet worthwhile?  I decide that it is. The temperatures and design of each pool changes, depending on its distance from the resort front entry.  The front pools have mid-grade temperatures and waterside bar stools, to lure the unresolved in from distance of the entry portico.  Drink AND soak?  Who wouldn’t want to do that?

 

But before even departing for the towel and dressing room, I learn that dinner at the top of the pools is included in the price.  This is a welcome change from the norm in Central America, where the standard rule is “overpromise and under-deliver.”  Now it is clear somebody is watching out for me and the wise choice as to time and money has been made for the evening.

 

Moving slightly uphill from the entry, as each pool becomes slightly more complicated in design (and privacy, mindful of water grottoes at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago), the volume and heat of the water increases.  Pool temperatures reach up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.  None are too hot, if taken gradually.  This is usually accomplished by standing three feet out from the many artificial waterfalls, and backing in – first getting used to the spray, and then gradually the directed pour of the small vertical streams themselves.

 

My favorite is about thirty-five to forty feet high.  Just the right amount of heat and shaped stream of water.  Not too wide, and not too deep so as to lose power.  Just right for tension relief.  It provides enough consistent pounding pressure to ensure the best shiatsu session I have ever had.   Your head throbs if left under this downpour too long.  But the shoulders can take every minute of it, and if bent over, your back offers up unconscious prayers to the universe for the gift of mercy it receives.  You move around, to get the pulsed pounding in different muscle groups. This is a difficult pool to leave.  Every home ought to have one of these!

 

After two and one-half hours of trying every pool, every bench, every steam room and every waterfall, it feels as if it is time to leave.  A body can only grow so relaxed.  And then, the coup de grace.  Relaxation has been so complete, it has been overlooked that the waterslides at the top of the hill remain untrodden.  So like kids on a camp holiday, we troop rapidly up the stairs to see what awaits.

 

It is a three-run platform, with a drop of approximately forty feet.  The first is a rather modest closed corkscrew design without steep drops and allows riding on your belly.  The second is a riskier closed tube Diablo that curves like convoluted spaghetti in total darkness until finishing in a sharp 45 degree final descent.  A number of people have not leaned back far enough and glanced their foreheads against the top of this tube.  Only forward facing, seating descents are allowed here.  A third trough is open, straightforward, and dips in graduated stages toward the waiting pools below.  Any descent posture you can imagine is allowed here.

 

Naturally the riskiest descent second tube is chosen for the first ride.  It is an involuntary screamer.  The total blackness of the cylinder below you disorients immediately.  The only presence of mind available is “what am I going to careen off of?”  When the final drop arrives, it is so sudden that the pool water is slicing into your eyes before you realize the descent has even started.  You emerge from the tube “spikes high” and thrashing water like a kamikaze fighter plane ditching into the ocean.

 

Three rides are taken on this thrilling second section.  The first tube proves to be too tame.  The third tube proves to be the best of all.  No reason to go down seated.  Belly first.  No hesitation.  Put the hands forward, as if in a swan dive, and straight down – yodeling all the way.  The test drive over, I take a second run with the notion of increasing speed.  That means up on elbows and knees primarily to lessen friction with the tube floor.  I go shooting out of the bottom parallel with the surface of the receiving pool, and hydroplane far beyond the expected landing area.

With much momentum still at hand, I am suddenly stopped.

 

“What the hell,” I mutter to myself, and shake my head to clear hair out of my eyes.  My hands are in full arrest, cupping the bikinied breasts of a 50 year-old woman I’d talked to earlier in the night whose birthday was being celebrated at Baldi.  She is far from peeved.  She winks at me and explains: “If I’d known you were coming I’d have prepared better.  Was it as good for you as it was for me?”  Her husband is laughing so hard he can’t offer any retort.

 

The following morning an 8 AM pickup van from our guide service at Arenal Mundo Aventura  arrives to take us collected acventurers to an 11-platform canopy cover excursion in the foothills of Volcan Arenal.  The arrayed zip-lines are close to La Catarata (waterfall) de La Fortuna.   After initial equipment checkout and safety training, an uphill ride through the jungle is taken that is so steep a low-geared tractor is necessary to pull our passenger car.  A similarly steep twenty minute uphill hike to the initial platform follows.

 

The preparation is all about safety.  Safety signals, and safety equipment.  There are top and bottom rock climbing harnesses that are cinched for individual fit.  The harnesses are locked into a metal pulley which rides over the zip line, and locked in further with triple carabiners.  Your strongest hand embraces a thick felt and leather glove which is grooved to act as a brake in the final moments of each of the 11 journeys making up the excursion.  They are very effective, even in wet weather. If held far enough behind you to act as a stabilizing force, that is.

 

The first few runs are modest affairs, meant to build confidence for those without the “certifiable” gene.  The rider is meant to get his or her braking distance calibrated, learn to maintain proper distance from the pulley with the braking glove, keep the legs crossed in front, balance as well as possible, and still enjoy the view.  It often consists of slamming through initial high canopy cover, breaking suddenly into the opening to a yawning gap (tallest was 180 meters) beneath you, and then riding gently uphill to additional canopy cover at the end.  The initial runs are 400 to 500 meters – approximately one-quarter of a mile.

 

Then back to back, the two “Big Boys.”  The 600 meter ride high above the canopy floor and past the shimmering ribbon-like 70 meter face of Catarata de La Fortuna.  Some lose their nerve on this section, and have to be taken tandem after this by guides who link harnesses and provide a measure of reassurance for the exposed runs which follow.

 

The other is the longest, a gentle 900 meter glide that seems to take forever and in fact makes one wonder if they will ever make it to the other side.   On my turn during this run, I look back at the waterfall.  My right or brake hand comes too far forward.  I get twisted somewhat into the pulley, and lose momentum.  The result is I do not have enough juice at the end of the run to make it all the way to the platform.  Previous training has prepared us to then turn backward, and pull ourselves hand-over-hand the final 25 meters to the waiting guides.

 

On other platforms, particularly those that are a much steeper and therefore faster ride, there are various adjunct braking devices at the end of the line to assist those who have come in “too high, too hot” and are in danger of banging fiercely against the terminal knot at the end of each zip line.  Some are plastic cones that snap away and provide a grinding belay sort of stop.  Others are thick blue ropes, wrapped around the zip line and meant to grudgingly give ground such that a very rapid stop is effected in a dynamic manner.

 

The secret goal of all of us, of course, is to come in so high and so hot that we snap the blue rope out of the guide’s hand, while not arriving so rapidly that our genital areas are rammed and our necks snapped back by the terminal knot which binds each zip line to its tower or platform.  High fives are given for the best hot landing at each platform.  Surprisingly, it is the women who consistently are the best performers in this subtle bit of bravado.  They consistently make the guides reel and backlash from necessary restraint to contain arrivals in the final moments of each descent. Smug looks of satisfaction upon departure to the next landing indicate that this is no mistake.

 

Our return to town is not via tractor once again, but by horseback.  It is a pleasant journey, free of drama.  The horses know the route and virtually guide themselves.  The only steering, really, is that necessary to keep the animals from clustering together and gossiping while they work.  Along the way, we stop at an indigenous village … mock village, really, as those who appear before us don’t really live there … for a demonstration of their raison d’ etre and (even the natives have caught on to the use of buzz words) green way of life.

 

Crafts are offered, of course -- at far above the normal trinket prices.  This is because the speeches and demonstration are played out with great earnestness and solemnity.  As if the tribe will utterly disappear should we not buy at least one mask or one talisman or one piece of faux pottery.  We are dipped into the numbing elixir of peer pressure and that politically correct mindset that says: “This is an authentic moment.  You must participate.  The Gods will be angry if you refuse them.”  Wallets therefore open much more willingly than normal, and are notably thinner upon the conclusion of the demonstration.  Salve for the western conscience, in exchange for greenbacks.

 

Along the exit south, the delightful shores of Lake Arenal make up for the lack of visibility of Volcan Arenal.  There are no red-hot mudslides or steaming fuminoles to be viewed this day.  I do witness however, in villas and casitas ringing the lake, the most consistently pleasing portion of Costa Rica viewed yet to date.  Including a fun lunch stop at “Toad Hall.”  No idea of the reason for the name.  But it is the Tico version of famous Wall Drug in South Dakota, which advertises its strange presence on monotonous billboards 300 miles in either direction prior to your arrival.  I have the best Bloody Mary ever tasted there.  And some of the best fish tacos.  They promised it would happen, and managed to deliver.