Visiting the Sleeping Giant

© puroticorico

La Fortuna, Costa Rica.

Due to the growing popularity of ecotourism in Costa Rica, it was easy to find transportation from Monteverde to La Fortuna – both common stopping points for adventure-seeking tourists. I simply let the hostel owners know what time my brother and I wanted to be picked up and they booked us a jeep-boat-jeep transport for the next morning.

Although this option is a bit more expensive than the public bus ($25 compared to $6), we saved ourselves a considerable amount of transit time by taking bumpy back roads to Laguna Arenal, where a boat was waiting to take us across the water to La Fortuna.

Like Monteverde, La Fortuna could be considered a tourist trap. In fact, numerous hostels in La Fortuna are partnered with hostels in Monteverde and San Jose so that business and profits are shared, which explains why transportation between hostels is so easy and systematic. Essentially, these destinations are part of an ecotourism network and hostel employees work diligently to make traveling easy for guests by linking them to sister hostels. More business for them, less stress for us.

The town of La Fortuna is predominantly composed of hostels and restaurants along the main strip. Everything that makes La Fortuna worth visiting is located on the outskirts of town, namely Arenal Volcano. This 7,000 year old, lava-belching giant is considered by geologists to be one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It erupted on July 29, 1968 after several thousand years of sleep and claimed the lives of more than 70 people in surrounding villages. It has erupted many times since in various degrees of intensity, sometimes requiring large-scale evacuations and other times serving as a moderate eruption for tourists to capture on their cameras.

After checking out the volcano, my brother and I ran into a number of familiar faces at the hostel and spent the night getting to know a handful of other travelers in the course of a self-planned cantina crawl.

The company of these travelers was fun and comforting, but I quickly learned that my Costa Rican adventure was somewhat distinguished from everyone else’s. As most accompanying travelers were thrilled by showing off pictures they had collected on their digital cameras, I became aware that my purpose in Costa Rica was not just to see as much as possible so I had something to fondly look back on once I was home. I wanted something more authentic than photographs, especially photographs that looked exactly like everyone else’s. I wanted a distinct experience, not a prepackaged vacation that the Costa Rican ecotourism network offered everyone. Instead of choosing some guided adventure off of a menu, I wanted to create my own.

Although the town offered great company and an interesting history to discuss, La Fortuna was totally commercialized and seemed too fabricated to have any sort of culture aside from tourism. I was ready to leave by the second morning we were there.