Volcan Poas!

I went to Volcan Poas yesterday with Marie-Anne, after toying with the idea of going to the beach and then deciding against it based on an 80% chance of rain on the coast. Rain at the beach makes the beach no fun. Rain at the volcano.. well, you expect it - it's in a cloud forest. But you have to see the volcano, it's part of the experience. So I chose the volcano.

We rode in the front of the bus and listened to techno/reggae the whole way (which is a bad combination, btw), and when we got there, the clouds had just settled over the mountains. This was disappointing, since we had been riding in the sunshine for two hours, and thought we might make it in time to have a hike in the sun as well. But we hiked up to the crater anyway, just in case (and since we had three hours until the bus left again, what else could we do?) We saw the crater for about three minutes before the fog came in and blocked in from view. Of course, we took pictures, even running up on the raised platform to try and get some of ourselves with the crater behind us. (We were too late for that).


After the fog came in, we took a few pictures of ourselves anyway, and then just stood around a little bit, disappointed. Amazingly, the fog left, and the sun came out and lit up the crater, and for about twenty minutes we took more pictures and gazed at the crater and smelled the sulfur and gazed some more and took in the colors and were utterly impressed.


Then the clouds came back, so we hiked up to the reservoir that is in the volcano's old caldera. That was beautiful, too, though it mostly just looked like a lake.We ate lunch there (we had bought sandwiches in San Jose) and found a squirrel. It turns out that Marie-Anne absolutely adores squirrels.

After resting there for a while, the clouds came in and covered our view of the reservoir as well, and it got cold, so we continued along the trail, which went up over a large hill and then down for a long ways back to the visitor's center. We bought some souvenirs (well, I did) and still had an hour and a half before the bus was going to leave, so we hiked back out to the crater. It started to rain on our way out, but I had my umbrella so we were okay. By now the clouds had completely covered any view of the crater at all, so we just looked at the whiteness for a minute or two and then went back to the visitor's center. We sat down and had a coffee with a girl from Argentina who we'd met on the bus, and then went back to the bus for the long ride back to San Jose.

It was a very good day. But gosh am I out of shape :-(