con mucho gusto

We are back in Santa Ana after spending four days in Arenal.
The road to Arenal is long and winding. The landscape changes from residential to farmland and finally into wild, green and sprawling cloud and rain forests. ¨Vivid,¨was the word that kept coming into my head. It was all just so damn alive.

I can´t do justice to how beautiful Arenal was. You´ll have to wait for photos. Our room was part of a row of similar bungalo style rooms. There was a small patio leading into the room, and from the patio you could look over a beautiful tropical garden where hummingbirds and butterflies played all day in flowers that looked like Dr. Suess made them up. And rising over the tops of the trees, topped almost constantly with a veil of white clouds, was the Volcano Arenal, the most active volcano in Costa Rica, and the ninth most active in the world. I could have sat on the patio all day long sipping mango juice or beer* and listening to frogs sing. Most nights that´s exactly what we did. Daytime was a different story.

In the past few days I´ve canopied through the tree tops over rivers, and saw the most amazing birds. I rode a horse to the top of a small mountain across from the volcano. I galloped through a primary rain forest, and across rivers that led into a sulphur lake. I saw howler monkies and toucans. I held a giant butterfly that just crawled out of a cocoon so it´s wings could dry. I took a different canopy tour, this one that was built for extreme thrills instead of sport, and went ziplining across the treetops, thousands of feet at a time, hundreds of feet above the ground.

None of the full stories will really do here though. You´ll have to sit with me sometime and I will tell you.
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Coming back to Santa Ana really was like coming home. We were greeted by everyone at Bar Amigo as if we were walking into Asgard. When I got home Perrocito was there to lick my face.

Mom and I were supposed to go to Monteverde on Saturday morning but we decided not to because we missed the sun while we were in the rainforest, and didn´t want to run off to a cloud forest. Plus, it was fun to be a tourist for a few days but in Santa Ana we´re having a way more authentic experience. There´s a party at Jack´s today, so I´m going to go get ready.


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* Imperial is the smoothest beer I have ever tried. I haven´t gone a day without it, or without an avacado. In fact, an Imperial and an avacado is a great bedtime snack.