Show Me the Way (Back) to San Jose

Rather than double back the way we came, we planned to do a loop back to San Jose via the volcano-side town of La Fortuna.  On doing some reading (i.e. more of that research stuff), we discovered this was a little more involved than we first thought.  It turns out that there is a way of getting from St Helena to La Fortuna called Jeep-Boat-Jeep, which, of course, doesn't involve any jeeps but that sounds way more exciting than Bus-Boat-Bus, although I reckon something called "Triple B" could catch on...

I should have mentioned, in moving from Brazil to Central America, we had also moved from Portuguese to Spanish. At least now, when people asked, "Hablas Espanol" , I could now say "No".  This was a big improvement over my Portuguese where I'd found 3 ways to say "Two" and, trust me, I still have several more variations up my sleeve to try. 

Our hotel in St Helena was managed by a really cool old Cuban guy who spoke about two more words of English than we spoke Spanish but we battled through our breakfast orders, which actually just  meant that we said "Si' to everything and were duly brought mountains of fruit, rice and beans, scrambled eggs, toast and coffee.  

He also offered me rum (I think) one night but there was only a little left in the bottle so I declined - well that was my excuse anyway.  We were sad to say goodbye to him and he shook our hands profusely as we set off. 

The Jeep-Boat-Jeep trip basically cuts across the mountain and down to the far end of the lake at the foot of the Arenal Volcano and from there another bus gets you into La Fortuna.  On the way, the bus has to make it's way past cattle being led by moustachio'd guys on horse-back - you really feel you're in El Rancho territory and I don't mean that big pub in North Ryde.still

The trip is worth doing just for the water views:

Volcan Arenal (as I and the locals call it) is still an active volcano, but disappointingly, although not unusually, the volcano's peak was obscured by cloud cover.  So it was just the misty mountain hop for us but not a whole lot of lava...

La Fortuna was blazingly hot after the cool mountain temperatures in St Helena so we took refuge in a cafe and had a couple of drinks while waiting for our connecting bus, which was due in an hour. 

Amazingly, all of our connections, hastily cobbled together as they were, came off with the bus arriving to the minute at the hotel we'd nominated as a pick-up point and we were shortly on our way back to San Jose.

From there we were going to hook up with our Intrepid tour and who knows how that was going to pan out!