The Dirt Field

Note: This post was written on Tuesday morning, but is not being posted until today because I just had time to finish it now.

I decided to kill a bit of time yesterday before my volcano tour, so I found a place to rent a horse for a short ride. My guide spoke a little bit of English, and he led us through both forest and countryside, showing me interesting plants and animals along the way. At one point, we passed an unidentified fruit-bearing tree. My guide reached up, ripped off a fist-sized fruit, and indicated without futhur explanation that I should take a bite of it. We were in the middle of nowhere and I was in no mood to be poisoned, so I waited until he took a bite of his own fruit before trying mine. It turned out to be guava.

The ride was completely exhilarating – we galloped for a couple of miles, pretending to be cowboys as he swung a lasso in the air. It was the best $10 I´ve ever spent, although my pelvis is quite angry about it today. Which is fantastic, considering that I am moments from embarking on a three hour horseback ride through the rainforest.

After the trail ride yesterday, I went on a tour of Volcan Arenal. A small bus took me and twelve other backpackers up to a trail, where we disembarked and hiked the two miles to the lookout point. When we started out, our guide said how long the hike would take and how far it was, and I couldn´t possibly understand why he thought it would take an hour and a half to walk two miles. Then I realized that he wanted to stop every ten feet to give a lengthy dissertation on everything around us while the mosquitos had their way with our exposed flesh. The guide would suddenly gasp, ¨Shhh! Did you hear that?¨ and would then proceed to alert us to thousandthanth time that somewhere in the distance, a bird had chirped. It was tedious, and as magnificent as the volcano was, the peak was covered in dense clouds. When the sun set, however, we were able to see small bursts of glowing red lava coming from the crater.

On the way back from the volcano, we stopped for a few hours at the superbly decadent Baldi Hot Springs. The resort had over twenty different pools of different temperatures, the hottest of which was a toe-scalding 152 degrees. I was a boiled prune by the time my group left to go back into town for dinner.

I´ve resumed writing a few hours later…

My day today began with a boat ride across a volcanic lake to the point at which I was to pick up my horse to ride through the rainforest. I originally thought my backpack was going to be given its own horse, so I was quite surprised when my bag and those of the two other people on the ride were left in the boat and carried away. Nobody bothered to explain in English that my bag was being taken by van to my destination town – I was under the impression that I had just kissed it goodbye forever, which would have been fine except that I really did not want to have to purchase more ugly, disposable underwear.

The horseback ride was amazing – a few hours of alternately trotting and galloping through absolutely gorgeous scenery. At the end of the ride, the other two riders and I waited in a small roadside cafe for a van to take us into town. There was a parrot in the cafe that was perched on a peg on the wall, so, being the tourist I am, I immediately started taking pictures. When I stuck my finger out (I don´t know what I was hoping to accomplish – bird don´t lend themselves to being touched), the bird latched its beak onto my tender flesh and gripped until I thought the digit was a complete loss.

After a long and breathtaking drive through the mountains, I arrived in Monteverde/Santa Elena, where I will be staying until Friday morning. I have my own cabin for $17 a night at the Pensión Santa Elena, a cozy, social, bohemian hostel in the center of town. My room even has a skylight and hot water, and the bug population is negligible.

I love Costa Rica.