TMac's Page: Arenal

In the city of La Fortuna, next to the Arenal volcano, we did some spelunking (hello Mooner) and a tour of the volcano area. The caving was pretty cool and as you can see here, we got pretty dirty while down there. We had to literally get on our belly and move like a snake through one part. We also had water up to our thighs at one part of the tour. There were tons of bats and the picture of the holes in the ceiling are actually made from bats. The caves themselves were amazing, but I was not able to get any great pictures of this. I had only been in caves in Tennessee before, but these all had electricity, so it was nothing like this caving experience. Some of the bats were vampire bats, but they do not eat the blood of humans. Most only eat from small birds and some from larger mammals like cows, etc. There were blood droppings from these bats in the cave. There was also a lot of bat dung, which I am sure we had all over us when we came out. It was a great experience! Well, not necessarily the bat dung, but you get the picture.

The Arenal volcano was more incredible than I can really explain. It is very active and is constantly spewing out rocks that are incredibly hot. At night, we were able to see the rocks coming out and as they broke apart, they caused red fire that we could see. We ate at a steak house one night and for 2 hours sat and watched the volcano erupting - very cool! It was dormant until 1968, when there was a huge explosion causing quite a bit of harm. The thing that is the most harmful from the volcano is actually the avalanches that can be caused by the rocks on the side of the volcano coming down. There is no lava, but only red hot rocks coming out of this volcano, as opposed to the one that we saw in Hawaii. We have now seen 3 active volcanoes in only a few months and plan to see 2 more over the next couple of days! We are going to become experts in the world of volcanoes soon.