Rio Celeste

The ticos said that October is the rainiest month and these past few weeks have definitely been proving them right.  The house of dreams has been the perfect place to ride out the storms, but don't worry we're not just sitting cooped up inside all the time.  Aside from the necessary ventures into town to go online and to get ingredients for all the delicious food Kirby has been cooking up (and a few things that I throw together:) we've also ventured out to explore some of the natural beauty surrounding us. Just a few minutes down the road there is a picture perfect swimming hole at Rio Fortuna, complete with a rope swing that we have yet to try out.  There are lots of other sights to see in the area and luckily we've made friends with some locals who have cars.

Hairo is one of the first people we met here in La Fortuna and his little orange nissan sentra/racecar has zipped us around to some great places, including camping at the foot of the volcano, soaking in the natural hot springs, and the furthest trek yet: Rio Celeste.

Hairo, like most ticos, has a very full work schedule.  It seems that lots of people here work 42 hour weeks, scheduled as 6 days of 7 hours each with Sundays off.  Hairo was born here in La Fortuna and his family seems well connected, so even though he's pretty young he has a good job as the supervisor of the landscaping crew at one of the hotels here.   He came by the house one night asking us if we wanted to spend his day off with him at Rio Celeste, a nearby river with hot springs and a waterfall.   We got up early in an attempt to beat the rain, but at 7:30am when he came to pick us up it was already starting to drizzle. 

 Since the roads are so bad here, with huge potholes and unpaved sections, it took us almost 2 hours to get to the trailhead even though it was only about 60km (~ 38 miles) away. The last 10 km or so we were driving about as fast as you could walk, traversing a road composed of big rocks, little rocks, potholes, and puddles.  Driving around in Costa Rica really gives you a new appeciation of what these little cars can do, especially when youre going one mile per hour  and driving in a zig zag pattern to more easily traverse the myriad of obstacles in your path. 

The rain let up for the last hour or so of our drive, then picked up again as we started down the trail.   It's nice hiking around in the rain here. The jungle takes on a mystical quality as the water trickles down the leaves and the fog swirls its way through the trees. 

The diffuse lighting is great for taking photographs as well, if you can manage to keep the camera dry.  Denise loves photography just as much as I do and has much more advanced equipment to accentuate her talent, including this super high-tech bubble cover that acted as a camera cover, backpack cover, and perhaps most importantly the final piece to complete her look as an overgrown jungle turtle with a silver shell. 


Our hike lead us to the waterfall, up the mountainside, and all the way up to the where the hot springs bubbled up from the mountain and into the river.  The flowers growing alongside the trail were so beautiful that I just can't leave them out, so...

The trail was beautiful, which is a good thing, because the climax of the trail was somewhat anti-climatic.  The thermal springs bubbling into the river were interesting, but I think that the colors of the minerals and the water are much more vibrant when the sun is shining.  It seems that in full sun the river takes on much more of a turquoise color.  Luckily we've all been to Yellowstone, and the colors there beat Rio Celeste anyday!


 Unfortunately, as you can see from this photo, they don't encourage people to get into the springs but we didn't mind too much because we have our own hot springs to visit just outside of la fortuna, which we stopped by on our way home. A great ending to a great day!