Costa Rica Days: Part Un

Recent events at Mansuite have paralyzed business as usual. Unjust disciplinary action, strong unfriendly winds from the east and a dwindling supply of toothpaste have defined post-spring break life. The weight of these realities has unfortunately halted efforts to provide due posts about our glorious trip to Costa Rica, which happened of course in lieu of our planned trip to Cabo as a result of a problem with the flights and a rerouting from Mexico to San Jose.

We enjoyed an impressively long trip, so posting about the entirety would take way too long and would prevent all of our voices being heard. So I’ll choose to talk about the first couple of days, and I will hope that my comrades will fill in the rest.

Hearts

It all began with a frantic departure from EC, with the team divided up into two cabs headed to JFK. The next thing we knew, Winston was asleep on the floor of the airport in Panama City, and THEN the next thing we knew, our connecting flight had landed in San Jose. It was there that we ran into this:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

With Mansuite + Dink somehow alive and in one piece, we got the rental car and managed to get out of San Jose alive. Windy roads and Jordan’s bad driving made Colin vom:

Luckily, Colin found this hilarious:

The rest of us also found this hilarious. Our first destination on the Costa Rican tour was the Arenal volcano, the big scary active volcano in the central highlands. Seeing as it was our goal to conquer this active volcano, we all shared a nice dinner at the hostel paired with a round of Imperials and proceeded to pass out.

We woke up the following morning to:

And this:

Scandal.

The hike up Arenal was stellar. Past the trailhead we forded a river and began the steady climb. After reaching the ‘don’t enter’ sign, we entered, and discovered a path down to a dried up lava flow path. AWESOME. We obviously elected to follow this path, and found a great opening in the dense coverage that offered a fantastic view up the volcano.

Epic. Incidentally, also our last moment on earth.

Then something strange happened. We started to notice the booming sounds coming from the massive beast, and we wondered what they could be. Then all of the sudden, LAVA! A tidal wave of molten red death appeared on the horizon, cascading down the relentlessly steep façade. We knew we were goners. “Winnsstoonn, we never should have gone off trail!” said Colin. Those were his final words.

Unclear how this fits into the story.

Actually, those booming sounds turned out to be massive rocks that were tumbling down the other side of the volcano a half mile away. In the bright midday sunlight, to us they only looked like regular boulders, but later that evening when we had finished all of our hiking around the volcano, we got a look at Arenal at night and we saw that those “boulders” were in fact glowing red chunks of volcanic material that constantly broke off from the peak and tumbled down the mountain.

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After surviving a live volcanic eruption due to impressive physical strength and Michael’s recently downloaded “momentarily stop volcanic eruption” app on his iPhone, we made our way to a nearby trailhead leading to the waterfall. What had been up to that point a day of sweaty, manly, volcano hiking quickly turned into this:

Raging homo-eroticism Part 1 of 24,530.

After a long morning out in the boiling Costa Rica sun, the chilly waterfall provided a much needed respite from the day’s intensity. Fully refreshed from the cool icy Costa Rican water, we headed for a final hike of the day to Cerro Chatto, a nearby dormant volcano beside Arenal. What was meant to be a 2-3 hour hike we did in about 45 minutes by running up the impressively steep terrain. It was an obstacle course of vines, rocks, and mud. The sky turned grey, the dense inland forest cold and unwelcoming. We moved on, following Winston’s green headband up and up, until we reached the peak of the monster. The prize for our efforts lay within the volcano’s dormant core, down a steep 150m cavernous drop into the basin that had formed inside the volcano’s peak. There was a lake there now; Michael, Winston, and Jon waded out for a brief and terrifying swim before scuttling out of the oozing sediment declaring, as a result of the massive prehistoric sea monster that undoubtedly lay waiting in the unknown depths of the volcanic lake, that this had been the most horrifying experience of their lives.

Tired, wet, and covered in weird volcanic lake water, we found ourselves deep inside the crater of a dormant volcano in Costa Rica at 5 pm. The dense clouds were rolling in and the warm guidance from the sun was rolling out. Despair! We hurried our way up the crater, back to the peak, and worked our way down the technical terrain back to the base of the trail. A light drizzle punctuated the dark grey skies. Exhausted, malnourished, and dehydrated, we stumbled back to the car in search of food and water.

Day One was truly ridiculous. Here are some of the remaining pics:

Sexual?

Sexual.

New friends.

ANTS

Our ride.

Sunday morning met us with glorious sunlight. We were headed off to La Fortuna, a nearby town, where we would meet up with our white water rafting unit taking us through the countryside to a morning of Class 3-4 rapids. The river wasn’t too high, so the rapids were unfortunately a bit gentler than we had expected. No one was seriously injured, which was a huge bummer. Colin will point out, however, that Winston did in fact bail out, only to be saved by Jon in a dramatic feat of strength. Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures from the rafting, so you’ll have to use your imagination.

After rafting, it was our goal to make it all of the way to Monteverde by nightfall. We had to get all of the way around the large inland Lake Arenal and then through the windy dirt roads in a matter of hours. The drive around the lake was fantastic and provided stellar vistas of the dramatic inland mountains meeting the expansive water. After a couple of wrong turns, we successfully made it past the lake to the windy roads leading to Monteverde—Costa Rica’s cloud forest region. Adventures surely awaited us there on Monday, but a curious detour would mark an unexpected stop that proved to be one of the most ridiculous nights of the trip.

i.e. .CLIFFHANGER. Stay tuned