Costa Rica 1992: Night Volcano Tour

 

    Before you jump to conclusions, I should explain that we didn’t see anything as spectacular as the photo above, but nevertheless, we had an interesting experience.

    We had a big adventure that night.  We met in front of our hotel at 7:00 for a night tour of Arenal Volcano.   Before the tour began, the leader told us that we were in for a secret treat:  We would also have a swim in a hot springs, so everyone ran to their rooms to grab their swimming suits.  

    The VW minivan drove us slowly down a very bad road, weaving back and forth to avoid the potholes.  It then began climbing up the slope of the volcano, until coming to a stop and unloading us.  We were all given flashlights and began walking further upslope for about 150 meters.  It was difficult to distinguish the mountain because cloud and darkness obscured it, but we could see red hot rock, crumbling as it rolled down the slope, breaking up, then rolling further, while making the sound of big clinkers.

    Off and on the clouds would blow away, and we could see the apex of the volcano, which displayed small showers of red specks of lava against the dark night.  Fortunately, there was no foul sulfur smell, something I had expected, probably because of the wind direction and some rain showers.  

    Several times we heard the “breath” of the volcano; low, short bursts of air.  Twice we heard explosions from deep inside the crater, but we couldn’t actually see anything.

    The Arenal Volcano did erupt in 1968, after being dormant for 400 years.  That later blast killed 86 people.

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Costa Rica 1992: Busing to La Fortuna

      Our bus trip from San Jose to La Fortuna was another punishing one for my back.  The bus was a rural bus, so it stopped every time it saw someone on the street flagging it down.  The countryside was mountainous, with a lot of agricultural crops being grown on the hillsides.  

    An ancient old man was sitting across the aisle from us.  He spoke only a bit of English, and he kept saying things to us, but it was very difficult to understand much of what he was said.  He kept repeating in a low halting manner, “I have no body.”(?), which left us flummoxed, but  I did understand it when he said, “Do you have whiskey?”

    During the last bit of our bus trip, it began turning very muggy, as we re-entered the moist country.  We were happy that we had hung our clothes to dry in our hotel room in San Jose, because, like in Manuel Antonio, those moist clothes would never dried out in La Fortuna.  

    La Fortuna is a town of 6,000 with Arenal, a beautifully cone-shaped active volcano, giving it character by jutting up behind it.  However, on the day we arrived, we couldn’t even tell in what direction the volcano was, because of the thick low  cloud cover.  We found Hotel Ambugue Bureo where our reservations had been made, to be a great place to stay; the best hotel we have had in Costa Rica.  It was new, neat, had attractive rooms with white walls with wooden trim.

    After checking in at 1:30, we took a nap for an hour and a half, then ventured out to explore.  We walked to a bridge over a beautifully clear tropical river.  Accompanying us on our short hike were two dogs from town, one of which attached itself to us at our hotel.

    We seemed to have had communication problems at the restaurant when we went to for supper.  We ordered “Gallo de Pollo” expecting something like rice and beans with a bit of chicken, but were served fried chicken, French fries, and cabbage slaw.  We thought we would order a fruit salad for dessert, expecting a big bowl of melon, pineapple, and cantaloupe, similar to what we saw some people eating a few days earlier, but what we received was two scoops of ice cream sitting in a slurry of Jello and canned fruit cocktail.  It tasted good, but certainly didn’t fit with the  expectations we had when we ordered it.

    Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Pioneer Nights

     Every June, McBride sponsors “Pioneer Days” a celebration full of early settler activities.  Although, not exactly the same, over the last two nights, we have been unwillingly participating in an activity that seems very similar to those during the days of the pioneers.  

    The Robson Valley has been experiencing two days of very strong winds.  Periodically these strong winds have blown trees down across the power lines, causing electrical outages.  For two consecutive nights (strangely it hasn’t happened during the day) we have had to live without electricity, just like the pioneers.   On four hours on Wednesday, and three hours last night, we spent our evenings, sitting in the semi-darkness, illuminated only by candlelight (and a couple of battery-powered flashlights).  

    We often complain about how quickly time has been passing, it seems like every time we turn around the week has gone.  We certainly did feel the fast passing of time during the power outages; the time just crawled, and c r a w l e d, as we waited for the power to come back on. 

    The outages certainly make us realize how much we depend on electricity for our entertainment at night.  Fortunately, we eat our evening meals early, so that was not a problem last night (it was on Wednesday), but getting through the evening without television, the internet, and reading, sure is.  Luckily, we have a wood stove, so heating isn’t a problem, and we have gravity-feed water, so that also works when the power goes off, but living without our electronics is sure a drag.

    Whenever a tree causes a power outage, it takes a while for it to be corrected.  The crews that fix it are centered in Valemount, which is an hour away from McBride, so it always takes an hour just for them to get here, then they still have to take more time to fix the problem.

    The bright spots in the photo above, shows a burning candle on the coffee table, in the lower foreground, the fire burning in our wood stove (in fireplace mode) in the middle of the picture, and above that another burning candle on the mantle.  

    We will be very happy to have the wind quit for a while.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: Planning Our Next Excursions

      After leaving the Gold Museum, we headed for the Tourist Information Center, which we found to be very helpful.  A guy wrote out a schedule for catching buses to Arenal and Monteverde, places where we planned to go, which saved us a lot of hassle.  We left the Center to then walk the four blocks to the InfoTur Center which he had told about.  

            The woman clerk at Infotur was a great, she helped us plan out the next four days, describing  the various hotels, and even making reservations for us at them, and we were also able to pay for the rooms there at the InfoTur Center, giving us vouchers for the rooms.  The service certainly relieved us of a lot of the insecurity we usually had during our normal practice of “flying by the seat of our pants” when we travel.  

    Before we left the woman at InfoTur told us to be sure to put our names in for the weekly draw, saying they give out some really nice prizes for tourists; things like free tours and wonderful souvenirs.  We filled out the stubs, and with our fingers crossed, dropped them into the box.

    Having been able to arrange for the next four days of our travel, we came upon the Serpentarium, a zoo for reptiles, which was strangely located on the upstairs floor of a downtown building.  It was full of all kinds of snakes, lizards, and tiny green and black poison-dart frogs.  Our main reason for going to the Serpentarium was to see if we could identify the big black and white snake we had seen in Manuel Antonio Park.  We couldn't positively identify the snake, but it looked mostly like a boa constrictor.

My painting can be seen at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Last Night's Winners & Losers

Here is a partial list, just off of the top of my head:

WINNERS-

    Trump & Family enterprises, Billionaires, The Heritage Foundation, Putin, Bigots, Christian Nationalists, Gun Nuts, Big Oil, authoritarian governments, sycophant Republicans, conspiracy theorist, White Supremacists, and global warming.

LOSERS-

    Planet Earth (and all of the life on it), science, women, liberal democracies (including the US), Ukraine, racial minorities, US National Parks and Refuges, US Justice System, US Constitution, Public Health, honesty, and compassion.

    

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

    He left the US and immigrated to Canada in 1973.  One of the main reasons for doing so was the results of the 1972 election, where the American public overwhelmingly voted to give Tricky Dick Nixon a second term, over  George McGovern, who was running as a peace candidate.   The author no longer trusted the American public to make the right political choices for him.  He is very happy to be a Canadian citizen.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992: The Pre-Columbian Gold Museum

  We had to get a 5:00 AM start the next morning to catch the 5:49 AM bus back to San Jose.  We lugged our baggage down to the bus stop shelter across from the little row of restaurants.  As we waited we talked to an Asian guy who had been to Costa Rica several times.  He gave us a list of budget hotels near the Arenal Volcano and the Monteverde Cloud Forest, both places we had planned to visit.  

Our trip back to San Jose seemed a lot quicker than coming, even though the time it took was the same.  This time there were no clouds obscuring the high country we traveled through, allowing us to see some of the coffee plantations.

San Jose was still as noisy, smelly of diesel, and chaotic as we had left it.  We carried the burden of our bags back to the Pension Costa Rica Inn and got a room before heading back out for breakfast.  My wife can’t think before breakfast, but she soon was refueled after a Big Mac.  I had Chicken Fajitas, and managed to squirt the hot sauce all over the shirt I had just gotten cleaned yesterday. 

After breakfast we headed down to the Gold Museum.  We were quite surprised at all the security measures we had to go through as we entered.  We walked through a powerful metal detector which went off when it detected my Swiss Army Knife, that I then had to check in.  No purses or cameras were allowed into the museum.

The first area we entered featured an art collection, which didn’t impressed me too much, although I did like some of the more contemporary paintings.  From there we entered the money collections, which certainly didn’t seem to justify all of the security we had to go through.

We then went into 3 Level of the Underground Bunker, and WOW!  It was really impressive.  I didn’t know so much Pre-Contact gold artifacts existed.  There were 1,600 gold objects.  We certainly didn’t see that much in Mexico.  There were gold collars, bracelets, ear tubes, beads, and frogs and birds with characteristic flattened feet and tails.  It was an extraordinarily dazzling display of gold.

        You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Costa Rica 1992, Some Junge Fauna

  Because it was so dark under the thick jungle canopy, I soon began opting for my binoculars, and just enjoying the things we saw in real time, rather than trying to take a photo using a telephoto lens, that I knew would turn out too dark.  The big thrill of the day was spotting a three-toed sloth hanging up in a tree.  They are such strange primate-looking creatures.  Sloths have very long claws and move so incredibly slow in every action they perform, making them seem very unworldly.

We saw a lot of tropical birds, including a flock of toucans.  There was a beautiful teal-colored hummingbird darting around, and a Woody Woodpecker-looking woodpecker with a red pointy head.  Along the edges of the trail we came upon a group of chicken-like or grouse-type birds, scratching around in the forest litter.

Insects were also on display.  We noticed a giant grasshopper (4-5” long).  When it took off to fly, it showed off red wings.  Orange, black and red, and yellow butterflies, fluttered through thick vegetation.

Hiking the trail was very taxing, because of the heat and humidity.  We finally turned around because my wife was feeling so dehydrated, so we again went to the beach to cool off.  There we met a couple from Ottawa, who told us that Mexico was three times more expensive than their guide book had said.  In comparison, they thought Costa Rica was cheap.  Our laundry cost us $6 US, and our cabin was $15 a night.  That night I had a delicious plate of rice and shrimp for supper.

    Below are some more photos of some other jungle critters I took that day.  I think that snake was above me.   I was happy to see that line of jungle ants all carrying bits of leaves, which I had always associated with jungles.

View my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca