Wish I was here! (Part 1)
You will note that my posts are less frequent during my time in Costa Rica. This is because I have more of a life here. Some good pals, some nice haunts and nowhere near enough days free to see all the stuff I want to.

As I have to be back in Spain next week and London the weekend after that, I thought I'd have to go and do something other than hang out in San Jose. All of my girly friends are doing other stuff. Emms and Nicki have been to the beach and have no doubt been boozing and man-ising something terrible after endless hours of exposing their semi-naked forms to the sun. The lovely Marie was off to a ranch with her sister and her mother, something like a Centro American Macbeth I guess. Oh and Mary Kiss, whom I mention here only because I said I'd say something about her in my next post, spent the weekend in Toronto where she lives. Weekdays she organises everything and everyone in the office, weekends she is a demon shoe shopper and culture vulture.

So I rented a a little 4x4 and hit out for Arenal, which is an active volcano about 140kms from here. The journey itself is quite magical. Outside of San Jose Costa Rica turns into a patchwork of green hills, forests and jungles. There is a slightly unreal feel to the roads, which are perfectly clean due to the daily rain scrubbing and bordered by lush vegetation in greener greens than I have ever seen. My digital photo-editing experience makes me think that someone has overdone the colour saturation in the real world Costa Rica. The houses that dot the countryside are all brightly painted and each has a unique character.

I arrived in a little village called Fortuna a little way from Arenal around 6pm, by which time it was dark. Unfortunately, it was raining and the top of the volcano was hidden by clouds. You can just about hear it from Fortuna, there is a small explosion every few seconds.

The problem is basically that during the dry season the place will be overrun by tourists, so the ideal way to explore Arenal is during the occasional dry spell during the rainy season. After booking myself into a cheap hotel that smelled vaguely damp I went out to avail myself of the local rustic cuisine. Initially the vaguely damp smell of the hotel is depressing, but thinking about it, everything around Fortuna is damp. The bioactivity of the soil there must be phenomenal. It rains for six or seven hours every afternoon for six months and the mornings are hot with some great sunshine until the clouds roll over. I imagine dropped litter decomposing while you watch.

At the first place I get some reasonably priced yet very boring fare and decide to move on to a better bar. I find myself in El Rufino, sat at the bar next to a Dutch couple watching the football on the TV behind the bar. Costa Rica are playing the USA and even though I am not normally interested in the game, I watched so I could feel culturally aligned with the Ticos. Costa Rica won 3-0. Shocking that the USA can't field a decent soccer team and noteworthy that the only games the USA is really world class at, are those that are really only played by Americans ; American football, baseball, basketball. The scenes of jubilation after the victory are shot from Mall San Pedro and played out over TVs across Costa Rica. I tell my new friends that right now, I live and work 6 floors above the cameras, when I'm not in Toronto that it.

(to be continued)