Hanging bridges, waterfalls and lethal creatures in Arenal
After another 6-hour drive through the most variable roads you can imagine we ended up in La Fortuna ready for more adventures and trying out everything the area has to offer.
The roads can vary between new motorway to potholed back roads within half a mile. You just can’t relax with huge lorries everywhere and the threat of being sent airborne by a ramp or a giant pothole, it definitely is not an easy place to drive, but at the end of the day it is a third world country working hard to catch up.
It was a bit confusing planning the trip to the rainforests in the north, how I’m here I understand why. There is a huge lake, rain forest and volcano activities being advertised but they didn’t seem to link together, and the reason for that is that they don’t. Each is a separate area, but the common theme is the spectacular view of the Arenal Volcano, which can be seen from almost anywhere, when the clouds permit, which isn’t very often. The lake is reservoir and now has all sorts of tourist activities on it and the rain forest is in another area which is more exposed to the prevailing rains.
First trip was to do some trekking on the volcano and to check out more wildlife. It wasn’t too promising when the bus picked us up in the rain with zero visibility. As we climbed out of La Fortuna and gained altitude the rain eased, and we even saw some blue sky.
This volcano had a major eruption in 1968 which wiped out the surrounding areas, so our initial climb was over the remains of the lava flow which is tricky in the wet. There is no commercial trekking up the volcano so all we could do was a tour of the lookouts for the best views. As normal the guide was hunting out nature but to be honest there wasn’t much around apart from a little fury pig thing which I missed.
As we trekked around the foothills of the volcano the clouds around the top persisted, but suddenly they cleared and gave us a great glimpse of the splendour of nature. As you can see from the photo is juts out of a relatively flat area of land, which makes it even more impressive.
Hanging Bridges
We then headed for the Hanging Bridges of Arenal. This is an incredible piece of engineering to attract tourists. Somehow, they carved a 3m wide, 3km path through heavy jungle with numerous valleys and gorges which had to be crossed. To achieve this, they constructed 9 solid bridge walkways across the smaller ravines at the lower levels, for the larger ravines and some significant valleys they built 6 hanging bridges that were between 80m and 95m. Bearing in mind this construction was built on the side of steep hills, surrounded by deadly creatures, you have to wonder at the human innovation, and it is why the whole project took 12 years to complete. It took over 2 hours to walk around it, but quite a bit of that time was looking for the deadly creatures!
Nature gave our guide a bit of a bad day at the office. We could hear the monkeys, but they weren’t coming out to play for our group, but what we have realised is that a lot of the species ere hare miniature, and hardly visible to the human eye. Hence the need for the guide and his high-powered telescope, which enabled some of these photos. Apparently, their miniature size doesn’t affect their deadliness, and the whole place is full of deadly creatures that are mostly invisible.
This little front is probably the size of a finger nail, we saw a few of them mainly because it was bright orange !
This is the view from a lower bridge back up through the jungle to one of the highest bridge. For anyone nervous of heights these bridges were a bit nerve wracking and they shack and wobble as you walk across them
This is the view out from the highest bridge towards the volcano, spectacular but he wobbling bridge tended to stop us dawdling
La Fortuna Waterfall
After the jungle trek, it was time for lunch and then we were off again to a huge waterfall to cool down. Certainly, the walk down the 500 steps was easy enough and the water was nice and cold for a dip, but then we had to walk back up the 500 steps in the heat, which left as hot and sweaty as we were when we started.
Craft Brewery in La Fortuna
Then back to the hotel and head out to explore the town, and to my complete amazement, we found a craft brewery, well it would have been rude to walk past it and not test their local brews!
White water rafting has to be one of the most fun things you can do on a trip, it is by far our favourite holiday adventure activity. We did our first raft ride on a river in Thailand back in 1991, but that we on a bamboo raft but I got the bug for flying down rivers and going through the rapids.
Our rafting history
The first chance for white water rafting was the River Tully in Queensland, Australia. That was exactly how I imagined it to be, with warm water, dropping over waterfalls and ending up in the river at every opportunity, though the sight of baby crocodiles sat on rocks watching us didn’t help with the confidence.
Since then, we have rafted on 4 different continents, and probably the most exciting was the Kali Gandackie in Nepal, an epic trip that I will relate at come point in the future. So, when we see white water rafting as an option, we always check it out, and in Costa Rica there seemed to be lots of options.
A bit of research led us to the River Pascuare being the best rapids, the trips are classed by their difficulty. Class 5 rapids are the hardest that can be run commercially, this was what we ran in Nepal. The Pacuare River had Class 4 rapids, so it was going to be exciting, and the trip was organised by Excuriones GTE.
The obvious other factor to consider is water level. Costa Rica has just started it’s rainy season, so though the water levels were quite low, this meant there would be more rocks to navigate (high river levels just go over the rocks so it can be easier), with the recent heavy overnight rain there was a lot of fresh water speeding up the river.
Rafting is dangerous
The thing about rafting is that it is dangerous and people do die. The rivers are powerful, and people can get trapped in rocks, under the rafts, or other obstacles and the power of the water just pushes them under, so the safety briefings are really important, and they were great on this trip. The rafts are accompanied by kayakers who are there to help in emergencies, and they also make useful photographers !
We set off with our crew of 5 people, in a 6 person raft. The way these runs go is that some of the best rapids are at the top of the river where you board. This is because the river is narrower and higher up, so you are into the big rapids almost immediately, which wakes everyone up.
The big rapids start early
The guys at the front get the wettest as they are being hit by all the waves, so they provide protection for the rest of the crew, they are also the people most likely to be thrown over the side by a wave. Wooksie and I took up positions at the front as we and done it before and took the biggest battering in the first half of the trip. In the second half Wooksie swapped with Anny from Barcelona who was clearly up for getting wet and having lots of fun too.
This is the only water sport I have ever known Wooksie get involved with, and she has an amazing track record of staying in the raft whatever the circumstances, I have tried to drag her over the side unsuccessfully on every trip but she is like a limpet attached to a rock.
This river didn’t have any waterfalls, but it had a lot of rapids with the water flowing over and around the boulders really fast. The excitement started straight from the start with a choppy Class 3 rapid to get us going from the start and bring reality to the team on their first run.
The river battered us for most of the 3 hours we were on the water. Some rivers you have sections where you drift along without much to do but we had white water bubbling around us all the way down thanks to the heavy rain on the previous nights.
Beautiful scenery along the way
The cool thing about rafting is you travel through really remote areas, and we saw loads of wildlife, in particular birds, hanging around on the edge of the river hunting for their lunches. There are also villages for the indigenous people that have been living on the river end for hundreds of years, so it is not just the adrenalin stuff.
Being cramped up in the raft can be pretty uncomfortable as you are twisted to face forward whilst your legs are locked under straps and flotation bags. The break after 90 minutes and a stretch on the beach was very welcome even if it took us about 2 minutes to recover the ability to stand up straight and walk again.
Class 3 rapid video
Then we were into the second section of the river and the ride home. This included two fantastic runs through sheer canyons which made for dramatic scenery as it squeezed the water into the narrow gaps at high pressure, so the waves and obstacles were flying past.
This video is of a Class 3 rapid near the end of the ride.
And then we finished up with a Level 4 through the canyon to finish the day in style.
Eventually we reached the end of the run back at the rafting company HQ and ready for a nice lunch, talk about the excitement with our new rafting mates and a sleep on the coach in the way home. The rafting company had taken some great photos on the trip, and I had been experimenting with my new GoPro, so we have some videos as well.
After the excitement over more overnight tropical storm, howling monkeys and flooded bars we headed off to the Cahuita National Park. We had struggled to find an organised trip that didn’t involve snorkelling, so we drove up to the park ourselves.
A chat with the ranger on the gate and we soon had ourselves a guide organised, and we set off. Surprisingly, in the opposite direction to the park, but the guide clearly knew what he was doing and pointed out an owl that looked exactly like the tree it was sleeping in, its camouflage was amazing.
The guide then had us staring all over a tree looking for an iguana which was right in front of our eyes, but almost invisible. We then set off along a 2km long boardwalk that was built through the swamp to enable tourists to see the wildlife without wading through danger and all the snakes and other nasties that live in the swamp.
The other highlight was this little yellow worm which seemed harmless enough but turned out to be e baby viper, already with all its venom loaded ready to go.
I was a bit surprised at the lack of wildlife on show, but that is the problem with nature, it isn’t cooperative. The main even was a troop of cappuccino monkeys who are a deeply unpleasant creature. They are very territorial and seem to attack pretty much anything that comes along, including tourists.
Cappucinno monkeys
When we (and other tourists) stopped in their territory, they surrounded us in the tree ready to attack so it was wise to keep moving. Apparently, these monkeys even rape the Howler Monkey females, probably in the hope that they stop screeching at night,
At the end of the boardwalk the guide took his cash, and relieved me of an addition £7 cost he didn’t have any change – it isn’t just the monkeys that are dodgy.
The trek then continued along the deserted coastline, but by now we had seen quite a bit of deserted beaches, and we did get to see a little raccoon hanging around.
Now if the daytime was a bit boring, the night time certainly wasn’t with a range of creepy crawlies that seemed to belong to nightmares more than our world, but here are a few shots of these amazing creatures of the night that came alive when the sun went down.
We could hear the frog in the daytime, but as it is completely translucent, it is impossible to see it in the daylight, but at night it’s eerie glow appears in the torch light.
This scorpian is only visible when a blue light is focused on it.
The challenges of letting go and embracing freedom
Being retired isn’t so easy when you have owned your own business for 23 years, and spent most of them hunting clients, delivering assignments under pressure whilst keeping the company together. So, in effect, when I declared that “I am done”, that was the start of the process.
After my daughter’s wedding, I was good to my word, I jumped in my VW Camper and headed to off-grid to the Highlands of Scotland with my dog Tess as company. Wooksie (my wife) asked how long I would be gone for, “more than a week, but less than 3”, and that was about as much planning as I had done. The trip to Scotland is a separate blog, but for here, I was gone 10 days, rejoiced in the freedom but eventually got bored with nothingness and made my way home.
I had been delivering a company strategy over the previous 5 years that moved all our services to digital online solutions depending on face-to-face service, this development work helped us through Covid and gave us a way out. We had reached a point 2 years previous where the change was done and in effect, we could deliver our services from anywhere in the world, we just needed a laptop to manage the whole thing. As I explained to Wooksie, we can now live on a yacht in the Bahamas, login every day to deal with requests and put our feet up.
At this point Wooksie pointed out that she doesn’t like yachts, the sea or the sun as she is a red head. This was the start of the first unexpected issue, my business partner of 23 years, who often complained she hated the job and wanted to leave, but who happened to be 12 years younger than me pointed out she wasn’t ready to retire.
Boom I didn’t see that one coming, I had a vision for a retirement full of fun, adventure and travel which wasn’t shared. I had always had this exit plan that we could have a business that would essentially run itself with minimal input from ourselves but give us an income, this was now seriously under threat.
This came as a real shock, but slowly we worked out how to make it work. The company would keep running to allow for a gradual transition as the hard-earned client based slowly withered. As I wouldn’t be doing the sales, account management and service development demand would inevitably drop off, which it did. This seemed a solution that worked for everyone, including the staff, as the last one was happy to retire in that timescale.
The first year was hard in other ways as well. I struggled to say, “I’m retired”, so when offers of work came in, I found it really hard to turn them away, as money is money and habits of a lifetime don’t change overnight.
Talking to others that had taken retirement from employment, they seemed to have different issues, but these helped me understand my challenges. If you go into work for an employer everyday of your life, when you stop work, you are faced with a void – suddenly you don’t have to get up, go into work or get on with your task list or routine. I’ve noticed these people seem to drift back into full time or part time jobs as they struggle to fill the void.
When you own and run a business, it is different, you live that business 24 hours a day, clients, staff, finances, suppliers, payment is in your head 24 all the time, and you are the escalation point for everything, so saying you are retired doesn’t change much. What does change is that your energy and ambition is no longer driving the business forward with an eye on the strategic challenges and opportunities, but this takes time to take effect.
The challenge for me was that I wanted this stuff out of my head as I had mentally moved on and opened a new chapter in my life, but the business was sucking me back in. We also faced a number of unexpected challenges from government bodies that undermined the 5 years of investment in that business model and the services we had developed, which was hugely frustrating for me and our customers but helped with marking the end for the team, the company was over.
To be honest, in that first year of supposed retirement the company were hit by these unexpected missiles, we might even have decided to call it a day anyway. A number of our competitors of 20 years did make that decision, but it was a tough year for all of us, and we found a way though as we always do.
It wasn’t just work that was changing, at home we had one daughter heading into her last year at university and youngest son had just finished A levels and was heading for university. There was a lot of disruption at home too, this isn’t the normal retirement scenario for most people, having 2 kids at university and having to shut down a business!
By the end of summer, Wooksie had warmed to the idea of less work, but not enough to consider living on a yacht in the Bahamas. As a way of marking the start of a new era, she came up with the idea of doing the Inca Trail in Peru (BBC’s Race Round the World helped a lot with the transition !), this was something we had planned 20 years early but pregnancy put an end to that, So 5 days after youngest son went to Liverpool Uni, we were on a flight to Peru to open our new chapter. It was great trip, but not without incidents that will be part of the travel blog in due course.
The real benefit was that it started to draw a line under being the dedicated business owners and always on tap parents, though mobile phones still worked in Peru 😊.
Even though I was trying to stop working, I settled for “running down” as I was back in the office 2 or 3 days a week, but I did offload the baggage of “attendancism”, and moved to a “work to live” mode rather than a “live to work” mode.
This worked, I continued delivering limited client assignments to keep the company accounts in good shape and in truth, when winter came along, I was glad of the company of the team. I’d go to the gym or meet a mate for coffee, but head to the office to help and have a chat with the girls.
The first year ended the following April undertaking a progress review for a client. This was a review of recommendations I had made 18 months earlier that had been reported to the top-level board in that organisation. The board approved the report and funded the implementation of the recommendations.
My review was to check on progress with the consultancy that had been given the task of delivering our recommendations. What became evident was that hardly any progress had been made, in fact, they had implemented things we had said should NOT happen.
At a workshop, I asked the group, “did any of you actually read my report and recommendations”. there was silence. Millions had been spent on this consultancy to implement our recommendations, and, they did what they thought should happen not what they were commissioned to do, and the things they implemented were the things that had repeatedly failed in the past.
At this point, I was completely exasperated. I honestly concluded I was wasting my life doing this sort of work when I could have been out having fun, the money was obviously nice but most of it goes on tax anyway, so what was the point.
12 months on from “I’m done”, I had another big moment where I realised my hunger for money was gone as well, and I didn’t want to waste my time advising people who were going to ignore me. I now really wanted to get on with my next chapter.
I discussed this with my old friend Ugly Bloke in May; he had managed his transition at a much younger age and was a good sounding board for me. He didn’t believe that I was going to call it a day, so I wrote down some promises about what I would and wouldn’t do in the next 12 months, because I still did have obligations to the team. He looked after the notes on a napkin and The Ugly Bloke commitments proved very powerful when I had a big decision to make in the next year.
Lessons from the first year
So, what are my conclusions from that first year:
You can’t just walk away from something that has taken 20 years to create it is hard to walk away from the old habits and behaviours, it’s different to retiring from a job. However, you can make promises to yourself about the scope of what is acceptable and test it out.
Having an epiphany, where you realise it’s time for change, helps the motivation to make the change, it is very hard not looking back. I used to advise clients they had to “mark the end” of the old ways before change can happen, this applied to me too.
Making assumptions about people around you, what they want and need, how fast the world is changing undermines plans all the time.
Signature adventures – the trip to Peru marked a major change in our life, it enabled planning future adventures to places we had never been, like Patagonia, safaris, and other adventures we can look forward to, in fact, they start to take over your life.
So, moving into the second year, I am now openly talking about being “retired”, though I prefer to say being “finished with work”. I have my commitments to Ugly Bloke to uphold, so let’s see how it goes.
The daylight was fading in the grey wet skies as we set off from Grisdale. Our next destination was Kielder Forest on the border with Scotland, after a long rainy night, and being soaking wet after the trails, the advice from the Satnav that it was nearly 3 hours drive wasn’t particularly welcome.
The journey out of the Lake District was slow and very wet. There were waterwalls cascading out of the cliffs everywhere, roads with rivers running across them, it is amazing how much water 2 inches of rain on mountains can produce. It occurred to me that I would probably never have another holiday in the Lake District so I might as well try to enjoy these views, the floods will be my permanent memory of the Lake District.
Road to Scotland
The route to Kielder Forest campsite took us over the border into Scotland and a 3 hour drive through the Kielder National park. I managed to lose my mate in the Jeep, who was a bit quicker than my old van and our route was rather meandering and my GPS seemed to be sending me in a different direction, so we decided to make our way separately to the camp site. We later realised I was using Waze, which had a different view of the borders than the Apple route.
Gremlins strike
Gremlin Strike – I should have guessed, the Gremlin was in the satnav. It took me off the main road on to narrow single track roads but when it turned into a mountain pass with just gravel I decided it was trying to kill me, so I gingerly turned the van around on the edge of a cliff and headed back to civilisation and the long way round.
Eventually I arrived at the campsite where my mate was getting organised. What we hadn’t expected was the storm of midges that awaited us, clearly the Gremlin had recruited its mates to help out with it’s attack on me and the van.
Midge Attack
We couldn’t eat outside thanks to the midges, the pub had stopped serving food, so we had a “date night” in the van, very cosy with tinned ravioli and tinned hot dogs. We then headed for the pub where we found a Newcastle United fan in his club shirt, and he seemed to know amazingly little about his team, either that or he couldn’t understand out southern accents.
Next morning, the weather was a bit better, and we set off on our bike ride. These rides were much better than the day before, but it is a vast area, but we had some exciting rides. There was heavy damp clouds and regular downfalls to keep us focused, but we clocked up over 30 kms.
Kielder Trails
There was a great new area with a couple of new red runs to get the adrenalin running. As with all good things, there was a downside, the climbs back up but the e-bikes make life a lot easier as we get older. This is the new track called the EE Mile.
This was followed by another red run called “Run into the Valley”, the camera missed the first section which was fantastic and the second extension was infested with low tree branches and gave our faces a good slapping on the way through but all good fun, here it is and watch out for the branches that hit me in the face.
The day ended with a long climb to the top of the mountain and a big red run, that went on for ages and dropped us down through the mists into the car park.
The top bit was still thick in cloud and we found the rest of the trail despite the signs sending us the wrong way again.
As the altitude dropped the visibility got better. The Trail splits on the way down but we worked out which way to go (not helped by the map) and then we picked up the big trail back into the car park, not overly complicated but plenty of speed on the way down.
Heading to Hamsterley Forest
Back to the car park the midges were waiting for us, and took full advantage our tiredness and attacked in full throttle. As we departed the rain started to fall again, so time to head south through the North Pennines and heading for Hamsterley Forest and our next ride and maybe some decent weather.
The 3 hour drive down from Keilder towards Consett took us along some amazing old Roman roads, they were incredible. We all learned in school about how the Romans built their roads straight, well you could really see it in that area, they just went straight over the tops of hills and down the other side – absolutely ideal for cars to overtake my camper van so I didn’t feel like a mobile traffic jam.
Having seen the countryside around the borders it is absolutely no surprise that the Romans decided to build Hadrian’s Wall to stop the Scots raiding. It is a desolate and remote place full of natural beauty, I guess the surprise is that they bothered staying that far north at all, Scots, Midges and Gremlins, and they thought a wall would save them – obviously having a laugh,
We ended up at our third campsite in the foothills of the North Pennines, more lovely people and still freezing cold in the middle of summer but at least it was dry. So, we courageously had a BBQ in the biting winds that whipped cross the hills and dried out some of our cloths.
Then we took our beer into the camp kitchen and recreation room, where it was at least warm. Armed with a couple of cold cans of beer we turned on the TV, up popped the Blues Brothers film, a chance to watch a Hollywood classic, in the eyes of some people anyway. After 30 minutes I gave up trying to watch it for the umpteenth time, and it turns out, it was the same for my mate.
Next morning we woke to bright sunshine and finally, some warm weather. I was up early, made my mate a cup of tea in bed and we had a proper camp breakfast of bacon, sausage, eggs and bacon – we were ready for a big day.
Hamsterley Forest here we come, I’d even found my missing trainer hidden under the dashboard, but still no sigh of the book.
