The first day, Gabe, Allen, and I climbed Volcan Maderas, a 1600ish meter volcano with cloud forest and a crater lake at the top. Since this is the dry season, the cloud forest was not especially cloudy, but it did still have branches dripping with mosses and the short, twisted trees. It reminds me of a fairy tale. These high elevation forests and the paramo, the high elevation shrubby prairie-like habitat, are my favorite ecosystems in Costa Rica. So I always enjoy hiking through them.
The next day, Gabe and I rented bicycles to bike 11 kilometers to San Ramon, a small dusty town on the other side of the island, and hike to a waterfall. To visit the waterfall, you can either pay $3 to go on a well-marked path owned by a ritzy hotel or you can pay $1 to walk on the community trail. They recommend that you hire a guide for the community trail because it is not well marked. Guess what we did--choose the community trail and decided to tough it without the guide. Yep. I think that we were fairly lost for the first hour or so. Gabe doesn´t. At any rate, we hiked in mostly the wrong direction for a while until we stumbled across a few men clear-cutting the area who told us to follow the dry creek bed to the waterfall. And then, after a long, hot hike with not quite enough water or lunch fixings, we reached the waterfall. It was absolutely gorgeous. No Niagara Falls, but an imposing mossy covered cliff face with a stream of water that fell to a shallow pool that we could wade in. So the hike was definitely worth it.
Allan and Kaori left one day early to meet family in San Jose and catch a flight to Quito, respectively. Then yesterday, Gabe and I got up bright and early at 4 am to make our way back to Costa Rica. We rolled back into San Jose at 11:00 last night after 8 hours on the TicaBus, 1 hour on a ferry, and 2 hours on the local Ometempe bus. So we had a long travel day.
For the next few days, I am staying at Andrés´ house in the San Pedro area before I embark on other adventures.
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