Volcan Tenorio National Park

Today's trip was to the Tenorio Volcano National Park to see the Blue Waterfall and the Blue Lagoon, after the usual bit of casual wildlife spotting on the way.

Golden orb-weaver spider

This area had survived a hurricane so still had a lot of trees down. It had also taken a lot of recent rain, reduced to drizzle by our arrival.

As you can see, we are talking lush rain forest here.

Now the other feature of this walk was that it was going to be, according to our guide, challenging and muddy. Challenging I took to mean a fair bit of climbing to do, and muddy, well I have been to music festivals in England. How bad could it be? As I found after a while, pretty bad. The climbs would have been fine were it not for the mud, and the fact that there had once been a paved trail which had long been washed away and was now represented by randomly scattered concrete steps.

As for the mud, well think of the Somme, with added mud (and to be fair fewer corpses). We were supplied with hiking sticks. Really needed. We were also offered the opportunity to hire wellington boots. That bad.

 Before we set off the guide did say that they never guarantee the waterfall will be blue. The colour is created by a rare mix of sulphur, copper sulphate and calcium carbonate and the way sunlight strikes it, and heavy rains can alter the mix. Without wishing to be too much of a lawyer, I pointed out that is not actually guaranteed to be blue, if you call something the Blue Waterfall, you have rather left a strong implication that it will be blue.

Anyway, fear not. It was blue. Very blue. And only 250 steps down from the trail. And back up again.

 Further on from the waterfall is the blue lagoon, (Laguna Azul has a certain ring to it) again  satisfactorily blue. Indeed rather bluer that the Blue Lagoon of the 1980s soft porn movie of the same name starring Brooke Shields, but no one is allowed to swim in this one.

Out guide, with wellington boots

And this rather remarkable photo shows exactly the point at which the river turns blue - blue to the right, brown to the left

For fungi fans...

 A two-toed sloth