Day 6 - Drive to Arenal

I woke up early and hung out with Collin while he prepared us a breakfast of French toast. After breakfast, we said our goodbyes and hit the road to La Fortuna and the Arenal Volcano. On the road heading back towards Limon, north of Chahuta, there is a checkpoint with lots of serious looking police with automatic rifles. I am assuming that since it is the road coming from Panama they are looking for illegals as well as drugs. We were asked for our passports and were then back on our way within minutes.

We took the “back route” to Arenal turning north on to highway 4 and going through Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui, San Miguel, and San Carlos. It was a pleasant and easy drive with abrely any other traffic and took us about five and a half hours to get to La Fortuna pretty much without stopping. The highway brought us directly into town and we continued on toward the volcano and our hotel which was 2km past the town of La Fortuna proper. Just as we checked into our hotel, La Pradera, we got a glimpse of the volcano and then it started to rain pretty hard. Our room was decent and had a small porch area with chairs to admire the volcano and was worth the $65/night price (tax and breakfast included)

Since we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, we were hungry so we drove back to La Fortuna and ate a somewhat pricey Mexican lunch at Las Brasitas. It started raining really hard. Too hard to even make it back to the car so we ended up lingering over our Imperials a bit longer than we wanted. The rain finally let up and we walked around the town of La Fortuna for a bit before heading back to La Pradera where we hung out in the rather uninspiring bar and the watched the soccer highlights on TV and the bartender explained about the local teams and rivalries. We then went for a nighttime swim and afterwards craved something sweet so drove back to La Fortuna for an ice cream at Volcan Cone and a nightcap at the karaoke bar where we heard a girl with a amazing voice belting out some Diana Ross songs. After returning to the hotel we still couldn’t see but could hear a rhythmic thumping sound coming from the volcano