Day One - Poas Volcano

In order to experience Costa Rica without the possible pitfalls of being relatively inexperienced travelers and not knowing anything about the country, we elected to sign on with a guided tour. In the end, we chose Caravan, for a full tour of the country, and so far it's been the best possible decision we could have made.

We left San Jose at 8:00 and headed up the mountains toward the Poas Volcano. It's crater is at 8,871 ft elevation, and is (we are told) only visible 30% of the time. We left San Jose in perfect weather conditions, all 45 of us travelers secretly hoping the weather would hold. After a gorgeous 90-minute ride up very curvy winding mountain roads dotted with cute little homes in almost every color of the rainbow, we arrived at the National Park. To our great happiness the weather was perfect on arrival and held for the entire two hours we stayed.

The crater itself is a mile wide, with a wide lake at the bottom that glistens like liquid mercury, with a sulphurous steam trail emanating from an unseen chasm on the left that follows the breath of the wind as it tries to decide where on Earth it wishes to head. Clouds lingered behind the mountainous crater edges, but cooperated mightily and did not creep over the sides to obstruct our view.

Our tour group consists of Asians, Americans, Mexicans, Indians, Canadians, South Americans. We've all struck up odd little friendships and chatting groups, all so far focused on the places we have traveled and the places we dream of traveling. Two by two, we took turns taking pictures of the other couples over the rim of the glorious volcano and further dreaming about other fantastic things we might see if life stays this good.

We stopped briefly on the way back to San Jose to lunch at a wonderful restaurant with a view of wide green valleys, farms and puffy white clouds that seemed to go on forever on every direction. The restaurant put on a little skit featuring a "shaman" and two young "female tribe members" who danced, spoke and played instruments in mime against a prerecorded backdrop of words and music. It was quite sweet but most memorable in that the actors were all drop dead gorgeous. Did I mention that my honey and I are the youngest persons on the tour? Never have you seen so many retirees jump SO fast at their chance, at the end of the performance, to have a picture taken with the beautiful ones who performed for us. After a delicious lunch featuring local organic strawberry shakes or purees; grilled chicken or beef or fish; and finished off with beans, rice, salad and a fried plantain we headed to the bus for the final leg of our return trip which would include a visit to the National Museum.

The National Museum is housed in a converted fort. Costa Rica has no military, since it was disbanded (if i recall correctly, in the 1940's) to re-appropriate the funds for education and health care. If you walk at a reasonable pace, you can see the entire museum in 45 minutes or so. There are a number of pre-Columbian artifacts, including a wonderful little room of metals and gold artifacts that seem simple compared to some other relics I have seen but still made my heart pound with delight.

My precious loved one, Marc, in case you haven't seen him, has extremely curly hair falling down past his chin nowadays, that, on the best of days falls in perfect ringlets Little-Orphan-Annie style, and in this humidity rather resembles a nest. To my delight, there was a gaggle of school children in the museum, all in dark blue uniforms resembling Boy Scout wear, and very often, when Marc was stopped to take a picture for me (both my batteries on my own camera were already used up this day) the children would point to his hair, rib each other and giggle. :)

As has happened on each afternoon, all the angels in the heavens seemed to stop over San Jose and weep uncontrollably for all the sadnesses that have afflicted this world since the beginning of time. Or perhaps they were only watching "Ghost".

Tomorrow we head for the rain forest where we are most limited on what we can take and will have no access to electronics or, of course the internet. We expect to see all kinds of wonderful wildlife and hopefully even the green sea turtle, which actually spawns and hatches there this time of year.

On our return three days from now, we will write again,

Until then,
Namaste
Jeree and Marc