The town of La Fortuna became famous when the nearby Arenal volcano became active in 1968, and had a series of eruptions, the last of which was in 2010. The eruptions launched a tourism boom in the area, which continues to this day.
Unfortunately, you can no longer climb that volcano, nor, officially, the others nearby. So instead there is a huge industry of private tours on private land to try to keep the tourists coming: frog tours, zip lines, sloth tours, rafting, bird watching ….
DH was psyched for a physical activity, but didn’t want to do any of the organized tours. He’d heard mixed things about whether or not Cerro Chato, one of the nearby volcanic craters, was actually open to tourists. Google Maps made it look like there was a road all the way to the top.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s see if we can drive up the volcano.”
We knew the first part of the road was on private land, and we’d have to pay to access it, but that was fine. We started driving up, but were soon stopped and directed to the parking lot and reception area to pay.
No, they said, you can’t drive up, but you can hike up. It’s about a 5 hour hike.
I looked at DH. We were not prepared for a 5 hour hike. The guy at reception said it was only 5 hours if you climbed down into the caldera which is now a lake. We figured we could skip that part.
The rep told us that the first part of the trail was well signed, but after that we would still find it easy to follow the one trail. We bought sandwiches, and began the walk on the paved, well marked trail.
After about 20 minutes of climbing we followed the well-trodden path around a barbed wire fence. Not long after was another barbed wire fence, and a sign indicating that the trail was closed.
“But we’ve seen others doing it,” said DH, “and the guy said it was open all the way up.”
When our kids were little and I let them talk me into something, I referred to myself as “Mommy the Gullible”. Apparently I still have that side to me, so we followed the well trodden path around the fence and started the climb.
By the time it looked like we were most of the way to the top, the going was getting rough. Much of the “official” path had been washed away by heavy rains. But by this time, there was no point my turning back; I figured I’d need DH’s help to get down some of the rough patches, and there was nowhere clear to sit and wait for him to scale the rest and come back to me. I wasn’t going to sit around in the muddy jungle being eaten by insects for an hour or two. And it turned out to be closer to two: every time we thought we were near the top, we were wrong.
We finally made it to the top and discovered that you couldn’t actually see down into the caldera. Unlike the volcanos we’d seen in Hawaii, this one had time for massive jungle growth, so the tiny clearing at the top was just a log to sit on for a few minutes to rest before going back down.
(Actually, the keeners slide through the mud to go into the caldera and down to the lake, but we’d hear that required serious strength and skill, and even DH wasn’t too keen on it.)
Going down I was grateful that I’ve been working with a trainer not just on my legs but also my arms, because I used them to swing my body through crevasses and down to the next level. Given my recently broken leg, jumping down didn’t seem like a good idea.
Important self-knowledge:
- I can be prodded into doing things that I doubt my ability to do. Often I can actually do them.
- I will never enjoy rigorous hiking. I like the scenery, but you can see a lot of beautiful stuff without the struggle and risk of re-breaking ankles. I wish I were one of those people (like DH and DD) for whom the challenge and victory of making it to the top is its own reward. But I’ve tried for the 30 years I’ve been with DH, and it still isn’t me. Oh well.
