The earth is on fire, folks, and nowhere is that more real than standing on an angry volcano where the earth’s molten core is hissing through cracks in the ground. If you can stand the overpowering smell of sulfur and the even more overpowering heat, you can get awfully close to such displays at Rincon de la Vieja, one of Costa Rica’s angrier volcanoes at the moment. Parts of the park were shut down recently because having tourists blown off of a crater is bad for business, and scientists aren’t so sure what this crater is doing. But they know ding dongs like me who love to tempt fate want a closer look, so they’ve left one “safe-ish” trail open where you can hike to fumaroles (boiling mud pits) and a volcanicita (yeah, it’s a mini-volcano) where the temperature on the trail is about 120 degrees.
It was interesting – the kind of thing that makes you wish you’d listened better in 9th grade geography. But I’d be lying if I said I was hiking to see fumaroles, as on this and the other two volcano areas I hiked, the short list of the things I wanted to see was monkeys. I could *hear* howler monkeys going berserk somewhere, but Johnny Guide said they could be a mile away. Sound travels in the rain forest apparently. I saw plenty of other things – fantastic orchids growing wild, bizarre iguanas, and twisted trees and vines that are growing out of trees growing out of trees to get to get to the sky. Everything in the rainforest is symbiotic, Johnny Guide says, and everything survives because of something else. My slightly more cynical epiphany was that every living thing is opportunistic if given the opportunity.
I found another hot springs – this one a legal one with something like 17 different pools of varying temperatures cut into a smoldering hillside. Tourists by the truckload came to paint mud on each other and sample the pools, and though it was possible to find a few pools the throng of tourists missed, I strongly prefer the secret spa discovered by Rio Celeste. Still, this landscape felt as if straight out of Avatar, and it’s a challenge to count how many times a day you say, “What the hell?”
