Costa Rican Honeymoon Part 2

Part 2: The Beach and Our First Adventure

See Part 1 of the honeymoon Here!

November 8, 2008 (Mic’s birthday!)

The picture above shows the vendor’s booths that crowded the area at the entrance to the resort from the beach.

My confession about the beach: We never actually swam in it, we stuck with the pool. Oceans freak me out a bit, I saw a star fish in the water, and there were lots of little crabs and I’ll admit I was a bit scared of what else was in the water. We took lots of walks on the beach though, waded a bit on the water and checked out a few sunsets on the beach. Like this one.. that wasn’t a really amazing sunset, but still pretty nonetheless.

Here’s a shot of a wedding on the beach (on the left left), complete with 4-wheelers cruising past.

Below: The gorgeous sky.

The honeymooners

November 9, 2008

Our adventure to Lake Arenal and Arenal Volcano

Early morning breakfast at the “19th Hole” restaurant.

Beautiful views from breakfast!

After a long drive we arrived at Lake Arenal to take in some views.

Our tour guide for the trip. Showing us some of the plants in the rainforest.

Huge tall trees!

In the middle of the walk there was an aboriginal hut and a presentation and they showed off their creations. Kind of weird but nice to get a bit of history on the walk.

There was moss all over the trees.

We saw a Costa Rican farmer on our drive to the Volcano from the rain forest.

Our driver stopped the bus here on this 2 lane bridge and said okay everyone hop out and take pictures! Cars were whizing past, it was kinda funny. But a great place to take a picture of the volcano. It was a bit cloudy so we couldn’t see the top.

Baldi Hot Springs

We went to Baldi Hot Springs, which had great views of the volcano. They had 16 different pools with varying temperatures. The closer you were to the volcano the hotter the pools were. The grounds had beautiful gardens and many paths all over. They were building a few new buildings when we were there. It wasn’t busy at all. We really enjoyed ourselves there.

This one was soooo hot. I so wanted to sit on those chairs, but I couldn’t handle even putting my feet in!

Each pool had a sign telling you how hot the tubs were. We didn’t find these signs to be correct at all. Sometimes the sign would say the pool was supposed to be really hot and it wasn’t at all, and other times it said it was going to be cooler and it was really hot.

Below is the view of the volcano from the hot springs. We were quite lucky to be able to see it this clearly, we heard that often people are really disappointed on this tour because they don’t get to see the volcano at all. After we left the hot springs resort we drove for a few minutes and went to a spot that we could see lava eruptions from the top (small but still neat). Then we had a LONG drive back to the resort.

Part 3 still to come!