Our visit to Arenal Volcano National Park

Our main target here in the La Fortuna area was visiting Arenal Volcano National Park. We made an early start to get there, we hoped, before the clouds obscured views of the mountain and while more wildlife was out.

The walk was generally enjoyable, even in the constant rain.

But the trail itself was quite muddy at times, requiring all sorts of maneuvering to get around extended puddles and deep, slippery mud. Jen, unfortunately, doesn’t have waterproof shoes and had a bum knee after the previous day’s hike, so this was an especially difficult challenge.

Had we worn our sandals, we could have perhaps just walked right through the mess, though I’m sure we’d have needed a trekking pole for balance while unsuctioning our footwear from the mud. Neither of us took any photos of the difficult muddy sections, so we only have shots of the good parts of the trail.

One thing we noticed is how difficult it is to spot wildlife in these conditions, at least for amateurs like us. The constant rain meant that there was movement everywhere, the impact of thousands and thousands of raindrops bouncing leaves back and forth. Given the already visually cluttered landscape, it was tougher to spot an animal moving through the jungle. You often hear an animal before you see it, but the surprisingly loud chorus of rain on all of these leaves made for quite the racket too. Brief lulls in the rain allowed us to hear bird calls and occasional rustling, but we didn’t see any coveted wildlife species.

So we instead focused on some of the smaller details of the forest.

By the end, we were so thoroughly soaked through, even with full rain jackets. But this initial hike was just a warm-up for the longer hike we had planned to do. So we stopped at the trailhead kiosk for a quick glance at the map, chatting with a couple hikers who had just returned from the trail. They told us that the trail was very muddy, and the view was still socked in. But we started off anyway, following a large bus tour group that had just gotten started too., and hoping that we’d see some of this mysterious wildlife.

I mean, look at all the super cool wildlife we might encounter:

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for us to encounter a few much-worse-than-we’ve-seen sections. The group ahead of us unsuccessfully attempted one major stretch and, by consensus, summarily canceled the entire tour right there in front of us.

By this point, we were already skeptical that we’d enjoy the remaining experience, so we headed back too, hoping to walk an adjacent road to another viewpoint and perhaps see something along the way. But once we walked a bit, that seemed unlikely too, and we finally called it, headed back to the car, and drove back to our hotel in La Fortuna. Jen did see this worm, though, which we joked was the only wildlife we had properly spotted. -S🇨🇷