Somehow I am allowed to still pick activities, after the day of ten thousand wet steps. After saying that I most definitely figured out the rain pattern in La Fortuna, I determined the afternoon was a great time to go for a hike at the nearby Arenal National Park. You’re supposed to be able to maybe catch a view of the volcano, and the wildlife nearby is allegedly good, too.
And you know, a great time to hike is generally when it’s been raining a lot, as nature is full of dirt that becomes wet dirt (aka mud) once the rain has moved through. And it’s the rainy season, so this means lots of mud potential. The rain isn’t the boss of me. I do what I want and pay the price and act surprised about it later.
Because what if the volcano is only shy from this side and we can gaze upon its visage from the other side?! Or what if I befriend an army of coatis or see a whole big flock of toucans?
When we set out, it was still raining. Maybe the other side of the volcano was no longer raining? This proved to be false hope, as it was in fact still aggressively sprinkling on us when we arrived. Snapping an image of one of the main trail signs proved to be difficult as it was in fact surrounded by a big ol’ mud pit. Surely a good portent for our hike. Surely.
We chose the trail that looped around to see a really big tree, because I am a sucker for big cool trees, and Costa Rica has a lot of them. This one is called “El Ceibo trail,” which takes you past a big giant 400+ year old Ceiba tree that’s survived a bunch of the nearby volcanic eruptions.
Also joining us on this hike are the Noisy Portuguese Speakers (NPS), who don’t seem to know where they’re going, but they’re pretty shouty and abandon ye all hope who desire to see wildlife, because it is certainly not gonna happen with these people around.
Out the gate, we find lots of big ol’ mud pits to circumvent. We can observe the NPS and not go where they are going. I am grateful for my trail shoes, but even they will be no match for the mud holes we will encounter. A lot of the locals wear rain boots and I would surely be fearless if I was so smart as to have a pair of those.
We fortunately left the NPS crew at the branch of the trailhead to El Ceibo. We ran into a lady who told us with a chuckle that the path to El Ceibo was very muddy. Ok but how muddy is very muddy? This lady looks fine. We laugh. We press on. Mud, amirite?
It wasn’t bad yet. It was a lot quieter over here on this other path and the trees arced overhead. We could hear monkeys doing monkey things somewhere not too far away. NEAT. There are also lots of cool big trees with roots like ribbons. It was overall a really nice trail, and would be finer if I had either 1 – come when it is drier or 2 – gone hiking in some rainboots.
About midway through, we encountered another couple. They were much more dire than the first lady – “turn back, it is incredibly muddy!” And the guy said the tree was not worth the mud. If we turned back a second warning, this would clearly be on us. Fate was trying to tell us something, and they both were genuinely quite muddy.
So back we went, with our red-and-mud-clad companions, and we chose to set out for the volcanic viewpoint instead, clambering over some volcanic rocks and up a bit more, into the vegetation that has started to grow in the lava field from a more recent eruption. I finally got to see the volcano!
The lookout was really cloudy. The other side of the volcano was not, in fact, less cloud-covered than the La Fortuna side. However, it did offer a really beautiful view of Lake Arenal and the misty mountains that surrounded it.
I decided to turn around and look at the volcano one more time, and I got to see ever so slightly more of it. A small success.
We were really good at navigating the trail back to the parking lot, where we saw a coati friend and a big ol birb that was related to jays and magpies. Ah yes, wildlife, in its natural environment: the parking lot of a national park.
It is in this moment I am pondering if we are muddy enough for the cars to be considered “excessively dirty.” I haven’t stopped to consider what the definition of that could be, but that’s next week’s problem.
I also googled El Ceibo tree later on and decided I probably would have traipsed through a lot of mud to go stand and take a picture of my tiny self at its big giant roots. I’d probably get banned from picking anything for the rest of this trip though!