Arenal on the Water

For our last full day in Arenal, we booked a canoe trip. We had a tough time deciding between a canoe trip or waterfall rapelling, but in the end we decided the canoe trip would be calmer, easier, and more peaceful. It was a half day trip down a Class II or III river. Given that we had never really been on any river with a real current, this was an entirely new experience. It was a fun trip. It was a little difficult because it was the first time my girlfriend and I had ever acted as a canoe team and I would have trouble understanding why she was doing what she was doing. Plus, sometimes, we would row the wrong way with our correcting strokes or whatever so the other one would be rowing so much harder not understanding why it wasn't working, but we learned a lot both about canoeing and about each other. For example, she learned that I could not always see the obstacles ahead of us that she could, as she was in front, and I learned to just trust more that she knew what she was doing and just offer her as much power as I could, and try to remember which way I was supposed to be rowing. Eventually, we seemed to get a lot better at it and even the guide said we were doing really good at one point.

(I would say that was probably the biggest part about this trip - learning about each other. With all of this hiking and canoeing and everything else, we seemed to learn so much about what and how the other person thought and how to communicate better. I had not expected my girlfriend and I to learn so much about one another on the trip but we did. The canoe trip was probably the pinnacle of all of this because of the way people experience it. It was seemingly the hardest and best part of the trip for me, but not in the way you would expect. I would say my favorite day in Arenal was the 13+ hour hiking day, but the day that probably made the most lasting impact in my relationship with my girlfriend was the day of the canoe trip.)

After we finished our trip, they made us lunch by the river. It was good and we got to talk to the three other people on the canoe tour with us, who were all really cool and around our age, probably a little younger. They were staying in-town and were leaving for Monteverde that day. We were able to recommend a couple different things they could try before they left and it ended up being really helpful to them.

That afternoon, we went to the Arenal Observatory Lodge, which is a hotel but also one of the best places to be able to see the volcano lava flows at night. It is really out of the way. So, if you intend to go into the city at all while staying in Arenal, I would not recommend staying there. However, if you are good with staying on-site the whole time you are there and just book lots of tours that include transportation, it is really a nice place to stay. We walked on some of their private paths, one of which led to a little waterfall, which was really nice, but the paths are not maintained as well. On our way back up we saw, you guessed it, more monkeys. (We saw monkeys pretty much every day that we were there. In fact, even when we go out hiking or kayaking now that we are home, we constantly think we are going to see monkeys in the trees.)

After the little hike, we made our ways back up towards the lodge, after another small hike through some gardens. Somehow, while waiting for the night to come, my girlfriend and I got separated. She had decided she wanted to go sit on another area of the deck and when I went to find her, I couldn't. So, after looking for her for a while I decided maybe she had gone back to where had been hiking before in the gardens. So, I went back but I couldn't find her. I did find a really awesome place for us to watch the volcano and it seemed no one else was there. I went back to try and find her and ran into her. She was so upset. She had no idea where I had been. I guess I had somehow just failed to see her back on the deck because she was sitting in a different area with some random people. Reunited, we went to the place I had found to watch the volcano and the clouds cleared a little so that we could see the top of the volcano and the lava. It was amazing. However, the best view came on the cab ride home when the clouds completely cleared and we could see lava just pouring down the side of the mountain. It was amazing.