Tenorio National Park Trip

This weekend I made a last minute decision to go on a trip with some of the volunteers. They are only here for a short time and have been doing trips every weekend. I skipped out last weekend so I decided that it would be fun to get out of Portero for the day. 6 of us went to Volcan Tenorio, which is about a 3 hour drive from our town. We left at 6am from Portero and got to the National Park around 10:30. We made a few stops on the way and also had some car trouble on the way. We bought lunch (and went to a big grocery store!) in Liberia, the capital of the Guanacaste province. After Liberia, we still had over an hour to go to get up into the mountains.

From the car driving to the park

The turn into the park was  gravel road and we missed it the first time so we had a bit of a detour and backtracking (even with the GPS, we got lost twice). The gravel road was about 7km long, but it took a long time to drive it. There was a reason we got 4WD on the car rental. About halfway up the road, we thought we had a flat tire, but the sound somehow corrected itself once we kept driving and we never figured out what was wrong with the car. We had quite the drive into the park between the very bumpy gravel road and the huge hills- definitely not as terrifying as driving in the Andes in Peru (with no guardrails), but still it kind of felt like we were on a rollercoaster.

Too bad these pictures didn't really turn. The roads were much steeper than they look like here

Once we got to the ranger station, we paid our entrance fee and were on our way on the 7km hike. This park is on top of a volcano and is known for its Rio Celeste (blue river). The water with sulfur in it from the volcano mixes with calcium carbonates from the river and produces really blue water.

We hiked up through the woods and got muddy and hot on the walk. The first stop was the waterfall, which was quite a hike down, but definitely worth it when we got there. Some people were swimming, but the water in the river was freezing so I didn’t go in too far. It was nice to feel cold though after being so hot in Portero the whole week!

Trying to figure out how to get back up the steep slope!

We continued to the Mirador (lookout point) and took some more pictures of the mountains and trees with the clouds hovering above them.

Our next stop was the blue lagoon where we ate lunch. The blue water smelled like sulfur and was kind of cloudy, but it was still interesting to see and the waterfall was very pretty. After we ate lunch, we returned on the same path because we needed to return the car before 6pm.

On our way back to the ranger station it started raining, but didn’t start pouring until about 5 minutes before we were back. I had a poncho (yay Flying Pig ponchos!) and was very glad I had packed it. We still got pretty wet getting back to the car, but all fell asleep on the drive home, wet and muddy, anyway.

We had a few stops on the way back- ice cream, grocery store, pharmacy for contact solution( can’t find it in Portero), and gas. We then proceeded to get quite lost and ended up somehow coming into Portero from the wrong direction. We asked a few people to make sure we were going the right way (back on dirt roads and now getting dark) and made it back at about 5:30. Luckily this meant we didn’t have to pay for two days of the car (they were open until 6pm), but it was cutting it a little close.

All in all a very fun day and the blue waterfall was probably one of the coolest places I’ve ever been. I don’t think it tops Iguazu Falls in Brazil though. It seems like getting a bunch of people together and renting a car is the best way to go on trips because otherwise you pretty much have to do guided tours. Because most of the things to see in Costa Rica are in national parks, the locations are nearly impossible to get to on public transportation. I will be able to get to a few of the cities on buses, but I’m definitely planning on getting more volunteers together to go to other parks around the country.