A few days catch up....

We left Puerto Viejo on friday and travelled by riverboat for 4 hours to Tortuguero. On the way we were able to spot crocodiles, iguanas, monkeys and lots of birds and butterflys. We stopped off for another traditional lunch with rice, beans and plantain (which are served up at every meal!) at a riverside restaurant along the way which could only be reached by boat.

Tortuguero beach is a protected turtle nesting site but as its not the right season at the moment we weren´t able to go on the usual guided walks of the beach. We stayed at another well located hotel, right on the beachfront this time and left early the next morning, again by boat, to start our journey to the rainforest.

The trip to get to Rara Avis rainforest lodge had to be undertaken in a trailer pulled by a big tractor. They started off by getting us to put everything in bin bags and we had to swap our shoes for rubber boots! This didn´t even get close to preparing us for how awful the journey up there would be though - we spent more time off the tractor than on it and the driver was continually having to make several attempts to get across the worst muddy sections of the trail. There were bridges made of wooden logs with big holes in and the driver even had to get out at one point and dig the mud with a shovel to make it past! The whole journey took 4 hours and we were covered in mud and exhausted by the time we got there. The pictures should describe this better...

The rainforest lodge was lovely, even though we were staying in a big wooden lodge with no electricity and some very large rodent type animals could be heard passing through the rooms in the night! We went on a few guided hikes (including a night hike) and saw some snakes, frogs and lots of unusual plants.

As there was no opportunity to leave in the evenings we spent a lot of time drinking Costa Rican rum (which is very nice!) and playing cards...by torchlight after the electricity in the main building would cut out at 10.30pm!

I also had a swim in a very cold pool underneath a waterfall before we headed back down to the town on the tractor again (the journey back down wasn´t anywhere near so bad!).

I´m now in La Fortuna, staying in a hotel with a view of the Arenal Volcano. The volcano is constantly spitting out lava so we were able to go out at night yesterday to see the lava flow in the dark. We then went to some volcanic hot springs which were very relaxing. There were lots of different pools of different temperatures set in tropical gardens, some of which had jacuzzi style jets and waterfalls of hot water.

I´m having a day of relaxing today followed by a volcano hike later, then its white water rafting tomorrow.