Back to the dirt field and corrugated shed that is Drakes Bay airport. The scenic 45 minute flight back to San Jose was a trip highlight in itself, it felt like quite the adventure flying over the rainforest in a little prop plane enjoying the stunning views below.
Back in San Jose, we picked up a rental car ready for our drive to Arenal. While we were completing the paperwork a customer fell down a broken manhole in the parking lot and hurt himself quite badly – a reminder to look where I’m walking at all times!
When we were researching this trip on-line so many people said that driving in Costa Rica is really hard, that the roads are in very bad condition and signs are hard to follow. Maybe that’s why the rental place tried to convince us we needed to rent one of their GPS’ at the hugely inflated rate of $100 per day! We were happy to find that Google maps worked perfectly well on the iPhone and had no problem navigating at all. We also found the roads to be in much better condition than anticipated and we had no problem getting around at all.
It took us a couple of hours to get to Arenal from San Jose. It wasn’t nearly as touristy as I thought it was going to be and we had a very pleasant surprise when we got to our hotel, Arenal Springs, to find 4 stars of loveliness. Mike really is much better selecting hotels than me. We had a nice room with a view directly onto the volcano (even though 2/3rds of it was covered in cloud) and the resort had nicely landscaped natural thermal baths, not at all tacky like a lot of the others with lots of individual pools so we could go and soak our weary bones after all the bone rattling boat trips over the last few days.
We did 2 hour night tour which focused mainly on frogs and butterflies. The tour was interesting and we got some great photos but the bonus was that we did get to see 3 sloths high up in the trees all quite active (relatively) since they are nocturnal.
We were back to the hotel by 8 pm and spent a couple of hours in the hot pools under the clouds. We had the place to ourselves…bliss!