La Fortuna Adventures

Our bus ride yesterday took a little over 4 hours. The first half was good.... it was the second half that was a bit insane with all the stops it had to make and all the people crammed into the bus at that time.

Our Hotel is called "Hotel Oruima"....I´m in room 12 with Erica the Lawyer from England. It´s a pretty nice room....very small... two twin beds, small TV and a bathroom. Very clean. This is the only place so far that uses new and very thick white towels. WOW!

Once checked in, we all headed over to the tour spot to book what we each wanted to do.

http://www.desafiocostarica.com/index.htm

All of us booked the Arenal Volcano observation point and the Baldi Hotsprings for 5 pm that night. We also decided to pick up pizza and beer for the viewpoint. It cost $17.00 USD for the tour part and 2,000 Colones for the pizza. Beer was on your own.

Pick up was at 5 pm...and they were at the hotel 5 minutes prior! Costa Ricans are on time.

The observation point was at the bottom of the mountain, quite a distance away.........very different to where I was last time I visited a volcano! The clouds were also covering a bit of the top, so we didn't see anything right at the start.

We put on music..... first Madonna, then the Grease soundtrack so we could all sing along. It was so much fun standing in the middle of the road singing, eating and drinking...hoping to get a glimpse of some "red sparks" coming down the mountain!

We didn´t have to wait too long, when we soon see red sparks coming down the mountain in quite a few spots. We all yelled " aw" and "wow" and just took crazy pictures of us pointing in the dark to where the mountain was. The one you could only see when the clouds lifted!

After about 1 hour of this tacky tourist thing to do, our driver drove us to Baldi Hot Springs.

16 Hot Springs of various temperatures surrounded by beautiful tropical gardens. Facilities include 2 swim up bars, Spa services & resturant.

This place was AMAZING!

Even I had to sit in different ones for up to two hours.

I left the place as a wrinkled prune.

Life is good.