A Carnival, Boiling Mud Pots and No Pictures to Prove It

Rincón de la Vieja (Old Woman's Corner, legend and information here)

• On Thursday we took a noon bus to Liberia; we played with a little girl who was sitting in the seat in front of us on the bus, then we arrived in Liberia where the central park is FULL of these super obnoxious birds that chirp all the friggin time. We spent the night at Posada del Tope in a room whose walls didn't connect with the ceiling so I was kept up all night listening to a make-out session(?) Let's hope that's all it was. Also, the walls were painted with blue chalk? Then getting into a could-be-dangerous situation where she was smoking with the guys who owned the hotel and one wanted to smoke some more but she said no. He could have gotten really angry and broken into our room while we were sleeping. Ugh, the things I have to deal with. But maybe that's just me being paranoid/ realistic. 
• We had informed the hotel workers the night before that we wanted to take the 7:00 shuttle to Rincon de la Vieja Park. When she wouldn't get out of bed, the man from the hotel came to our room to ask if we still wanted to take the  7:00 am shuttle to the park-- when we said we did and that we'd be ready in 2 minutes, he informed us that it had already left. So why did he even ask us? Who knows. We packed up, left our big bags in the office, took a taxi and arrived at Rincón after an hour long 16 km taxi ride only to find that we didn't have enough money to pay Alfredo (the taxi driver) AND the entrance fee. So we gave him Stef's camera and promised to meet him in Liberia later that night to pay him the remainder once we were able to get to an ATM. We walked all over the park's Las Pailas sector (the frying pans): the waterfall Congreja (the crab) through a really beautiful field that looked nothing like any Costa Rican landscape i'd ever seen, then waded at the bottom of the waterfall which was really cold. We saw monkeys on the way back and a guatusa (rodent, think: squirrel-rabbit). Then we took the other trail to a really beautiful waterfall that's full of water only during the rainy season. Next were the fumaroles, little smoking sulfur pots where I mentally invented scratch and sniff photo developing--I wanted everyone who sees my photos to be able to smell the sulfur! Volcancito (the  baby volcano), boiling mud pots, and a sulfuric lagoon. It's so bizarre to think that so much seismic and molten activity is happening so far beneath our feet, but under our feet, nevertheless! It's kind of unnerving, and very humbling. 
• We found a ride back to Liberia where we checked out of our hotel and waited for Alfredo, the taxi driver, who never showed. We decided to check into another hotel (Hospedaje La Chorotega) and do dinner at GuanaBurger where Alfredo randomly showed up as we were eating. Then we hit the Liberia Carnival teacup rides, bumper cars, Ferris Wheel--oddly enough, it was just the American girls riding the rides (read: the two of us) and none of the locals, although they seemed to enjoy watching us enjoy their carnival. Weird. Then showers (nice!), cockroaches, bed sheets covered in mouse poo, the movie Madagascar in Spanish and finally bed where I strangely dreamt that I died, (again) came back to life (again) then committed suicide with some friends via swallowing a poisoned towel that made you bleed out everything inside you, then getting thrown off a teacup ride into the oblivion. In the dream I lived with a big family and Costa Rica was at war with El Salvador. You've gotta love malaria medication side-effects.
• We got up early on Saturday morning to go to Santa Rosa, Costa Rica's first national park. We realized that we didn't have enough money to enter so we bargained with the guy and got the Tico price, which is significantly cheaper than the foreigner price, and students are somewhere in between. Strangely, though, the super low prices don't encourage Ticos to visit their national parks-- I know if national parks in the United States were really as cheap and easily accessible as Costa Rican parks, I would never be at home! We hitched a ride on the 7 km walk to the ranger station, hid our bags in a HUGE tree near the entrance and started walking the 12 remaining kilometers to the beach. We knew we wouldn't make it all the way to the beach, much less there and back, so we walked as far as we could. Los Patos Trail (The Ducks) had a huge snake skin, then a beautiful view of the valley. We saw monkeys, monkey babies, deer, birds, butterflies, lots of animal poop, some of which looked like it belonged to some big cats: that's what I really wanted to see, but thought better of it when I realized I was an unarmed girl in a big big national park--the puma would clearly win that war. Valle Naranjo Trail had a great view of Playa Naranjo (Orange Beach) and the internationally renowned surfing destination Witch's Rock, as well as Playa Nancite, supposedly a really good place to see turtles nesting. That spot is actually only accessible to scientists and researchers wanting to study the turtle's nesting habits: how cool that the national park has different rates and entrance policies specifically for scientists to conduct observational research. Yay! We had such a clear view that it was nearly impossible to believe that the beach was still 6 kilometers away! Back to La Casona which has a cool history (consult book) left our bags again underneath a big dead tree in front of the horse corral, saw iguanas and I saw some pre-Colombian rock carving petroglyphs near the well on the Naked Indian "Indio Desnudo" trail named after the trees that peel their reddish orange bark. We started walking back down the road and although it took a long time for a ride to appear we finally got a ride back to the road where a bus was on its way. 
• We decided to spend the night in Cañas, a small town near Liberia; as we were trying to find a hotel and the bank, a man came up behind us on the sidewalk on his bike and snatched my tampon bag--coincidentally enough, I had JUST decided to fill the bag with my camera and wallet rather than tampons. Luckily, though, it got stolen BEFORE I went to the bank when I had $2 instead of the additional money I was going to get out. A really nice Mormon couple offered to help us: they let me call to cancel my debit card from their house, dropped us off at a restaurant (they didn't want us walking around alone) and offered for us to stay at their house for the night. Then they took us to a family triple birthday party where I talked with a lot of the nieces and invited them on our excursion to Las Pumas the next morning, ate freshly fried chicharrones and fried plantains, drank some beer, listened to music and chatted with the HUGE family for hours and hours. Then "home" (they told us their house was now ours) where we slept in their biological son's room; they adopted 6 other kids, all brothers and sisters whose mom died after childbirth of the triplets. The bed was super-comfortable, and the house was all decorated for Christmas. How funny that immediately after my first experience getting robbed and my first instance of being taken advantage of in Costa Rica, we meet the nicest people in the world! 
• We woke up early on Sunday only to find breakfast already on the table and that an aunt had brought by some newborn puppies, which were easily some of the cutest little creatures I'd ever seen in my life. Our next stop was at Las Pumas, a wild animal rehabilitation center founded by a Dutch woman living in Costa Rica. They rescue injured animals or take in orphaned animals that people find on the roadside or that are brought in by hunters. We explored the zoo-like rehabilitation center with Viviana and Raquel, a couple of the nieces we had met the night before at the triple birthday party. It was incredible seeing the animals that close, especially the pumas and jaguars---and ocelots, monkeys, toucan, parrots and lorries! There were several advertised "success stories" of returning animals to the wild in certain parks, although a lot of the larger cats are kept there indefinitely because they have had such extensive human contact and wouldn't necessarily be able to survive in the wild on their own: although, great efforts are made to make the human contact as little as possible with the rescued animals so it will be easier to return them to the wild when they are fully healed. We returned to the house in Cañas and caught the bus back to San José in the afternoon. Because of this amazing Tico family experience, I'm almost glad I got robbed. Everything is replaceable except the photos, and that's what I really miss, but it gives me a legitimate excuse to return to Costa Rica to take even more photos!