We decided not to go for the long drive to a national park to stroll through the jungle to some colourful pools, instead choosing to make it a more relaxing day with work in the morning, a leisurely lunch and then off to La Fortuna waterfall. This required walking down (and later, up) several hundred steps through a jungle encrusted on the side of a valley to arrive at the foot of a tall, really violent waterfall plunging into a small pool. Very dramatic, one of the best of its kind I’ve seen. It spurted out from a narrow tree-fringed notch into a tall, narrow bowl of a valley, one magnificient gush with a few light streamlets on one side, only enough to turn the rock green with ferns. The one on Hilo was taller but there one could not swim in the pool. I didn’t but the Gentleman Friend did, and he and the others were tossed around by the wild currents so they could not go very close to the fall (and nor should they).
We decided to walk back to the cafe on the way to town, about a 40 minute stroll through pleasant roads, with pretty houses, jungle and horse trails and of course the volcanoes around us. The later part of the walk was through a small settlement, with many children running around the streets, and it was good to see La Fortuna’s actual residents. The streets were broad and empty, the houses were tiny and colourful pre-fabs, and very close together.