Goodbye Arenal … Hello Manuel Antonio

25 March 2009

Wednesday was a long driving day. We left Arenal at 9 AM and with only an hour stop for lunch didn’t arrive at Manuel Antonio until about 5 PM. The distance: about 270 km. The first stretch — about 90 km to San Ramon — was slow because it was a severely winding road and we were stopped for a time for a tractor to clear a recent landslide. The second stretch involved driving the Pan American highway down to the Pacific coast. Driving conditions here were more dangerous than usual, as there seemed an unusual number of reckless drivers passing under unsafe conditions. The drive along the Pacific coast mostly went smoothly, although there was a major road construction delay of about a half hour. An interesting feature of the drive was stopping at a highway bridge over a river that contained (by Daniela’s count) at least 30 crocodiles! (And they were much more active than crocodiles I’ve ever before seen.)

I didn’t take any photos on Wednesday, but can share some from Tuesday, our last full day in Arenal. One wonderful feature of Tuesday was that the volcano was in clear view for a large fraction of the day. This is — I think — a rare event. We hear stories of months passing without a clear sighting of the volcano. We had the excellent good fortune to not only have a clear day but also be staying at the closest lodging to the volcano, the Arenal Observatory Lodge. We found this an excellent facility, reasonably priced, with nice hiking trails, spectacular landscaping, and with terrific animal sightings (guan, oropendula, toucans, coati, and howler monkeys in abundance). Add to that the excellent weather we enjoyed for our few days, and the experience was really great.

The photos:
1. Taken from the end of our hike to Cerro Chato, this photo shows nicely the contrast between the new lava field on the left and the older cone and lava flow on the right. Arenal was thought to be dormant as it had not erupted for several centuries prior to 1968. I love the drama added by the large cloud.
2. Bird sightings have been relatively rare for our stay in Costa Rica, at least of the most spectacular birds. We saw several toucans at Arenal, our best sightings of these lovely birds. This one was spotted by Ingrid in a tall tree outside our room, calling out at regular and frequent intervals for many minutes. The photo was shot with Ingrid’s Panasonic on 10× and a high ISO number, with significant cropping. The use of a high ISO number produces graininess when zoomed in, but I judge that to be better than the blurriness associated with slow shutter speed.
3. A nice memory for our traveling family subunit for this most excellent portion of our stay in Costa Rica.