Today we relocated to Arenal, near the now-dormant Arenal Volcano. We started the day, following packing, with breakfast at the Sol Bakery. We’d seen the menu a couple of times as we’d walked about and it seemed a good time to try something new.
Afterwards, Choo Choo and I scooted down the street to Tama Onda, a restaurant that has a large pair of “angel” wings painted on the wall. It’s a selfie moment. I did this for Choo Choo when we were in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, and I thought it would be perfect to make it a running thing with her.
She required me to also have a picture taken. I was perfectly fine with that.
The drive out to Arenal is not a quick one. Costa Rica is a very mountainous terrain once you head inland. And first, we had to get inland. That was retracing our steps back to the airport, then past to the city of Liberia. Onto the #1 highway, and eastbound.
The highway is now four lanes, which is both surprising and wonderful. In the past, you had to be good with passing, a non-trivial exercise when you’re dealing with trucks going uphill, tight curves that don’t offer a lot of visibility, and others doing the same thing in the oncoming direction. Suffice to say, our return to Canada so many years ago came with a number of habits we had to unlearn.
The drive to Cañas took about two and a half hours, which isn’t too bad, as there’s no direct route. And I overshot the exit, because it came much earlier than I expected. We had to turn around through an almost rural exit, come back on a side road, before entering the highway for about 400 metres and then getting off again.
The route northeast from there was, unsurprisingly, a lot of curves and rises and falls as we climbed into the mountains towards Lake Arenal. This was a poor decision, in hingsight. There were other ways to get our destination, but many of them were much more distant. We’d forgotten that, in Costa Rica, direct routes aren’t always the best ones.
Ruta 142 has quite a jog. Just after the small town of Angeles, the road turns east for quite some distance. And Google, apparently, doesn’t like that. Alex was our navigator, and Google told her that we needed to turn off and head down another road, away from the main one. It came with no explanation – such as construction or a highway closure – but one should trust one’s navigator.
It was, as it turned out, a rather nice drive. We passed by fields, by houses out in the open, and it was quite picturesque along the apparent plateau. The route rounded past some infrastructure to support the ever-increasing number of windmills, then veered suddenly left for a short distance, before plunging down a very steep road to reconnect us with the 142 along the lakeside.
As we started to round the western end of the lake, we started seeing signs for Café & Macadamia, a restaurant that seemed to cater to tourists. And, frankly, that was fine with us. It had a Mirador (a view point), which seemed enough of an interest.
The signs seemed to lie, the restaurant almost always around the next bend. It took forever to get there.
It was an interesting place. It was sort of like a buffet – they had a significant amount of offerings – but you placed your order with a clerk, who gave you a number, and then your order would come to you at a table. The tables were all in the covered mirador, the floor covered in broken macadamia nut shells. Two cats perused the tables, looking for handouts and the periodic skritch.
It was another 50 kilometres from the restaurant to our hotel. By Google, an hour. In reality, about two, including a couple of stops. And the stops weren’t solely because HEY! LOOK! GIFT SHOP!, it was because the road got windier and windier, stuck between the erratic terrain and the shoreline of the lake. Poor Choo Choo in the back seat was not having a good time.
We were relieved to be passing Tabacón, which was a landmark for us. We had looked at staying there, but in the 15+ years since the last time we’d been, the price has tripled and is genuinely not worth the cost.
Our destination – and as it would happen, one of the few remaining we could get when we were booking – was Montaña de Fuego. We’d seen the resort before when we’d lived in Costa Rica, it was a higher-end location that was out of our price range at the time. Now it is “reasonable”, though still more expensive than Arenal Paraíso, which had been our first hoice, which we couldn’t get.
Our cabin – a duplex – was on the back row. Originally miffed at being pushed to the back, I quickly realized it was a far better option. It was away from the road (which can get loud with the motorbikes and the truck jack brakes) and overlooked the Río Arenal valley.
The weather, which had been spotty rain for the previous hour, had cleared entirely, revealing the Volcan Arenal. I found a group of people at the top of the road leading to our cabin, all staring at the mountain. I learned that the group had been here for three days and not seen it once because of all the clouds.
The evening was quiet. No loud parties, no partiers walking up and down the road. The only sound, past our air conditioning unit’s fan, was the roar of the river and the odd buzzing of insects below.
