Costa Rica! #5 - Volcan Poas National Park

On Sunday we headed about an hour and 1/2 inland to Volcan Poas National Park. The drive itself was so fun and beautiful that we could've turned right around and come home and I would've been completely happy. The roads here don't tend to have a shoulder, so it makes pulling over to take pictures pretty difficult. And so I end up with pictures like this.

We stopped for lunch about 3/4 of the way there, at this awesome little place called Restaurante Tipico. Half of the restaurants in Costa Rica are called Restaurante Tipico, followed by the name of the lady who cooks the food. Lance and I always laugh at that: Typical Restaurant. :) The food was SOOO good!!

There are lots of churches everywhere, some of them really cool.

Like this one: mint green and filled up an entire block.

The whole thing was surrounded by ornate metal gates.

The whole drive we just kept climbing higher and higher into the mountains, and the views just kept getting more and more incredible.

At one point Lance just randomly pulled over (maybe because it was the first spot where he'd been able to in half an hour). We got out of the car to take a picture, and there is a whole gigantic waterfall right there next to the road!

We would never have been able to see it, so we felt like the luckiest people in the world - it was SO, so beautiful! And SO tall!

Grr!

We were coming from behind that purple tree, so see how we would've completely missed the waterfall?

I'm noticing a theme in Costa Rica: It looks like they painted every surface in the country a beautiful turquoise color about 40 years ago, so now everything is this faded, chipped, peeling turquoise that looks so cool - I love it! Come on America - get with it and start painting all of our stuff!

We kept seeing this black cover all over the place, and we were wondering if it was strawberry plants like in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. We found out later that the black ones were some kind of flower, and the white ones were strawberries. We got excited that maybe we'd be able to find some strawberries for cheaper than in the grocery stores near us, where they are ridiculously expensive.

All over the place you see old, crumbly buildings, but this is the first chance I'd had to take a picture. Some of them are pretty cool.

I was loving these flowers we kept passing!

It's hard to tell in the pictures, but they are huge! Like almost as big as a basketball!

For a while the terrain was looking quite a bit like New Zealand - there were even those little lines criss-crossing the hillside where goats/sheep/cows do their thing! We love those!

As we started getting higher, it started looking a little more Pacific-Northwest - lots of pine trees and moss. You could see the nearby volcanoes in the distance, kind of misty and covered with clouds. Such a beautiful sight!

At one point it was getting so beautiful that we just had to pull over. There was this gorgeous meadow on the side of a steep mountain overlooking the valley.

And it was covered with cows! It was so cool looking that I actually jumped up and down and squealed a little.

Even the fence posts here are beautiful!

Even the gutters are beautiful!

By the time we got clear up to the park, it was actually pretty chilly! We had only grabbed our rain jackets at the last second - we didn't realize it would ever be cold on our trip! I don't know how well you can see it in this picture, but there are two main areas that you hike to: a lagoon area, and a bit crater with cool, milky turquoise water.

The trails were so cool! It felt like we were walking through Pan's Labyrinth.

So much moss everywhere!!

It was quite the workout too - super duper steep on the way up, and super duper steep on the way down. Our legs were so jiggly by the end!

So we get to the first viewing spot, which is supposed to be this: a cool blue lagoon. (This picture is from the sign.)

This one is from Google.

This one is what we actually saw. :)

Back to the trail to the second viewing spot.

This is the map of the volcano.

 This one and the next one are from Google.

And this is what we saw.

Don't worry - I meant what I said earlier about the drive up being worth it in and of itself. And our hikes were amazingly beautiful!

We could look down and see a little bit of the volcano.

More 70's turquoise!

We hung around for about half an hour or so, just in case the fog cleared away.

There was one moment where everybody started oohing and aahing, running over to the edge. For about 60 seconds the fog rolled away a teeny bit, revealing another little layer of the volcano, but not much.

That little momentary glimpse of hope got us excited that maybe the fog would go away altogether, so we stuck around for another 15 minutes or so.

This little squirrel was keeping us all entertained.

It started getting pretty cold, so we had to snuggle to stay warm.

The park closed at 3:30, so we left without ever seeing the volcano. We weren't too sad though. We pulled over a couple of times to look at the view.

We were so excited that we could get cheap strawberries! We paid $10 for 3 kilos! And they were so delicious and fresh! Plus each kilo came with 2 dipping sauces - chocolate and sweetened condensed milk.

We were offended when the chocolate turned out to be Hershey's syrup. Bleh!

We lost about an hour getting lost. The GPS didn't have all of the small roads, and at one point we looked up to see that she had us floating around in the middle of nowhere, with no instructions as to how to make it back to the pink path. It was a little scary, in an adventurous sort of way. The silver lining is that it was dinner time as we drove back past the restaurant where we'd had lunch! This was the little side yard, where we had fun watching critters while we were waiting for our food.

There were some beautiful birds, and another animal that was either a giant rooster, or a small goat - we kind of kept changing our minds. (It was a giant rooster.)

We ordered the same exact meals as before, and shared. Lance's was called Tacos Suizos, and was this delicious, spicy shredded chicken in a quesadilla with refried black beans, guac, and chimichurri (kind of like pico, but more lime-y). Mine was a shredded chicken chalupa - mmm!! Our favorite meal so far.

When we got home we chucked that Hershey's nonsense and had strawberries dipped in Nutella for dessert. They were so delicious! I wish we could get strawberries like this at home.

Lance and I cut the tops off for freezing, while listening to/watching a beautiful thunder/lighting storm.

Mmm, smoothies! I'm kind of kicking myself for not getting more, but I'm sure we'll be up in the mountains again sometime soon.