After spending a day in Alajuela, close to the airport, we headed up the mountains to the cloud-forest town of La Fortuna. Steep inclines and declines were paired with a multitude of tight turns to make the drive very interesting.
Along the drive, we saw a sign for bungee jumping and made a spur of the moment decision to pull over and do it! The place was called Eco Bungee. We harnessed up and then climbed the tower that led us to a very lengthy hanging bridge. It took us a long time just to walk slowly across it to the jumping platform (the tiny green area on the right in the picture below). It was so scary walking across that thing! I was the last of our group to jump, and boy did it take me a minute to get my toes to the edge of that platform haha. It was amazing though. Highly recommend!
The next day, we started the morning with a hike through Mistico Hanging Bridges. The trail took us across numerous hanging bridges through the cloud-forest. Arenal Volcano was in our viewpoints for most of the hike, and we were fortunate to have clear skies to grab some killer views of the volcano.
After some hesitation, we opted to do the whole hike with Lainey in her special needs stroller. They had told us it would be manageable for the hike. Manageable is a questionable descriptor here. It was a steep hike with square pavers lining the trail for most of it. The inclines were just as challenging as the declines, and the gaps in the pavers made for some challenging terrain. That being said, Lainey wouldn't have been able to have walked the whole trail, so I'm glad we opted for bringing the stroller. Despite the difficulty with the stroller, the amazingness of Mistico was worth the challenges of having the stroller with us.
We capped off the hike with several hours at Baldi Hot Springs.
OK, this place is AWESOME. After reading some reviews of it, I was afraid it would have a water park feel to it, but the few slides were only a very small part of the experience. You basically move from giant ornate pools to more pools, with the temperature of each getting hotter as you get closer to the source of the hot springs. Most pools had swim up bars in them, with water falls along the edges. There's a small waterpark area for younger kids, but our kids were in the big pools most of the time. Allow several hours here for sure. We went Saturday afternoon, and it didn't feel even close to busy in most of the pools. There were plenty of people there for sure, but it's such a massive space that there is plenty of room to spread out. Our whole crew raved about Baldi!
If you do any research about traveling in Costa Rica, theft from vehicles is often mentioned as something to be cautious about. Parking at Baldi was probably the first time I felt concerned about that. Most of the parking is in an unmarked section across from a busy highway. I definitely wouldn't leave any bags or anything in your vehicle here. There's lockers inside that you can use!
We started the next day with a hike through Bogarin Trail. Bogarin is known for sloth sightings, and we were able to see several! We were too cheap to pay for the guides, but thankfully we could see where the guides stopped and pointed lol. There's no way we would have seen the sloths without the guides' help though, so if you want to see sloths in the wild, you should definitely pay for the guides here. We saw a few unique birds here, and my mom even found some tiny Strawberry Poison Dart frogs! Seeing sloths in the wild was on several of our hopeful lists, so it was pretty neat to see several here!
After a tasty lunch stop, our group split up and some went ziplining at Go Adventure Park. There were seven runs here with some rappelling at the end. All the zippers loved their time here!
We wrapped up our time in La Fortuna the next morning with a quick jump in the river at El Salto. This is a local favorite spot with a rope swing that swings into the river. It was a refreshing jump. The terrain was a little challenging for our four-year old, though.
Next up, the beach!
