Areanal Swimming and Volcano National Park

Arenal was a cool town, it is definitely a tourist area, but there was lots to do and the hostel we were at was a sweet place. They had a pool that we took advantage of, as well as hammocks and air conditioning in the room. The AC actually turned out to be more of a problem, as it was freezing all night the first day we were there, and the only way to change the temperature was to go to the front desk that was closed. The front desk guy hated us for some reason and had probably cranked the AC to torment us in one of his numerous acts of passive aggressiveness. We fixed it the next night though and everything was good. When we first arrived, it was crazy hot outside, so we went to this swimming hole that the front desk guy had recommended. It was this waterfall-pool area down the road that a bunch of local guys were hanging out at and swimming in the gorge. There was a rope swing that was really fun and after some effort, I made it to the other side of this small waterfall where there was an alcove you could hang out in. It was really a beautiful place, it reminded me of a few places in Australia like Mossman Gorge where you could just go and hang out and swim in water that was a good temperature in a really scenic area. Dave and Michael noticed that there was some shady stuff going on with the local guys and this girl that was hanging around, apparently she was giving hand jobs under the bridge. So apparently this swimming area comes with a local small time prostitute.

We came back to the hostel and I jogged around this park-trail area for a bit that was really pretty, and then we met up for dinner at a restaurante in town. More casados of course, it´s pretty much the only thing we ate the whole trip. We came back to the hostel and went swimming and cooled off before going to check out the Arenal Volcano. Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to see any lava that night, but we went back the next night and got to see it. It was pretty far away, but you could definitely make out the red lava flows that would occasionally come down the mountain. It was definitely cool, and I´m glad we got to see it on the clear night. Photos of that were pretty much impossible, but we found out that if you took a photo and zoomed to the highest setting, you could indeed see a tiny red dot of lava!