Volcan Poás at last

Well, this week a group of us hired a car and I eventually got to see the elusive Poás volcano. You may remember we tried this when Rita and Enda were over, but it was lost in a mist of cloud.

The pic of the week is looking down into the crater. You can see the steam rising from the lake and on the right can make out wisps of smoke coming from the fumaroles.

Tiquicia
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We hired the car straight after work on Saturday, and went to a restaurant called Tiquicia above the affluent suburb of Escazú on Saturday night. It had the most amazing view of the Central Valley I've seen. An enormous sea of light as far as the eye can see, and you can pick out San José, Heredia and Alajuela.

Poás
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My heart was in my mouth on Sunday morning at 6.30 when I opened the curtains to see what the weather was like. It was beautiful. The mountains were completely clear. When we got to Poás at 9am, the visibility was perfect. There is a lake in the crater, which had a partial eruption last year. The temperature is about 4o degrees Celsius and there is steam coming off it. There's a smell of sulphur in the air. The upper lake is beautiful too. It's an old crater that's been filled with rainwater.

La Paz
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Afterwards we went to the beautiful waterfall at La Paz. The price of $29 was a bit steep for those on tico wages, but a bit of negotiation got us in for the local's price of $15. Here we saw the butterfly and hummingbird gardens, as well as the serpentarium (snakes) and the ranarium (frogs). Then on through the trails past the magnificent waterfalls.

Barbara's departure
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My boss Barbara finished up for 2 months on Thursday. She's travelling around Europe. We had a great and very funny night on Thursday when she left. It will be tough keeping the school up and running while she's gone.

No Frontiers
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Some of you may have seen the Irish travel programme No Frontiers last week. There was an item on Costa Rica, which I thought was great, and gave a real sense of the place from a tourists viewpoint. You can catch the show here.

Heating up
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The weather continues to baffle me. I'd expected it to be similar to last year, but the evenings can still be very cold. Which only had in December / January last year. This week we had three really hot days. So much so that the blu-tack went hard and all my photos fell down.

US Presidential race
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I sometimes start my class with Headlines, where I write up headlines from English language newspapers and get the students to tell me the story. They have very poor knowledge of international news. But they were completely baffled when I wrote up Osama declares in US Presidential Race!
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Well, that's it for this week. I've only one more Saturday left on this rotation, so I'll have seven consecutive long weekends after that.

Until next week,

Chao,

Éamon

Today's headline in La Nación: Assassination in Guatemala of three right-wing Salvadorian deputies of the Central American parliament