This is the third post of three for today. Scroll down to see more vacation photos and notes about my day of culture yesterday.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION, PART THREE
Costa Rica: El Volcan Arenal

I had already had the idea that the earth in this part of the world was very powerful, the lush fertility at once breathtaking and disquieting.

And then we beheld el volcan Arenal.

The Arenal volcano, one of the most active in the world, cloaks itself with mist by day. Our first glimpse of it from the taxi was disappointing but tantalizing: a wide, tree-covered base vanishing at once into a cocoon of low-lying clouds. “You can never see it at this time of day,” the driver told us. “Wait until later. The Observatory has a great view.”

The Arenal Observatory Lodge, our home for two nights, is just a mile away from the shrouded cone and has managed to make itself almost as inaccessible. Surrounded by primary and secondary rainforest, the hotel is located on a steep hill at the end of many kilometers of the worst road we have ever experienced. The taxi driver took this in stride, as he did the herd of cows we nudged our way through on the way up, but Rob wished he had availed himself of the Dramamine.

We spent the first afternoon in the lodge, playing rummy and watching the rain fall in impenetrable sheets. There was nothing else to see. Visibility was almost nothing, until some atmospheric fluctuation parted the clouds, and we saw the Arenal volcano in its entirety.

I want to say that it looked like something from another world, except it did not. It looked like something from a primordial version of this one. I want to say that it looked out of place—who expects to look up from a game of cards and see a volcano?—except it did not. It was like a child’s drawing, a textbook case, an archetypal volcano: a giant, almost-perfect cone with a steaming crater on top, looming over the jungle like a demanding god.

I half-expected a flock of pterodactyls to swoop out from behind it.

It receded back into the mists soon after, but that few minutes was enough. After that, we were always conscious of its presence, whether it was visible or not (and it usually was not).

*

Arenal’s two big eruptions in recent memory were in 1968 and 2001, but it remains quite active on a smaller scale. At night, once the clouds float away and it stands as a black shadow against the dark sky, guests at the Arenal Observatory Lodge often see puffs of red-tinted smoke or minor flares of lava.

Rob and I experienced nothing on our first night but adolescent American girls flirting with other travelers in the common area outside our room. Then one of them said, “Look at that! I saw it!” We went outside to investigate (our room did not have a view) but did not see anything.

We were luckier the second night, after we switched to a different room. No volcanic activity until we were falling asleep, then Rob shook me and told me to look: lava and gasses spouted out of the crater in brief bursts, accompanied by a thunderous boom that rattled the windows. I tried to stay awake to see more but, exhausted and fighting a cold, I drifted off. Awakening with only a half-formed memory of the event, as if from a dream, I was determined to see it again.

*

Earlier that day, we went on a trek through the rainforest to an avalanche of igneous rocks that had cut a dark gash through the green expanse ten years before. The rocks remain piled in a precarious moonscape fifty feet high and (I would guess) a kilometer long. We climbed up, the group of us. The guide aimed a telescope at a tree where toucans perched, while children in the group threw rocks into a lunar chasm. I would have liked to watch the toucans or throw rocks, but I kept getting shunted to the back of the line for the telescope, and I did not want to lower myself to the level of the children, who were rowdier than a troop of howler monkeys. In the jungle, we had attracted such a fog of mosquitoes that I doused myself in a deet-based insecticide; I used so much that it stung my eyes and numbed my hands, and I was glad when it started raining and the deposit of poison was diluted.

After a shower and lunch, we went to the pool. As an Earth sign (I’ll blame it on that), I have a powerful aversion to water, but Rob convinced me to swim a bit. We had the pool to ourselves (it was raining), but later, in the hot tub, we met a woman who had spent the previous night on the other side of Arenal. From her description, it was clear that that was the side where all the action was: while it was possible to see a few isolated spurts of lava from the Arenal Observatory, she had seen lava flowing all night long from her position. Inspired, Rob and I switched our itinerary to include a night at the Hotel Arenal Paraiso, an establishment with a registration procedure so regimented that it was clearly designed by a renegade fascist dictator.

*

But first, an afternoon of errands in nearby Fortuna, a small town whose name would be at home in a Star Wars movie: “Han Solo and Chewbacca landed on Fortuna and strolled into the cantina.” We changed money, dropped off some laundry, arranged for transportation to Monteverde, picked up some groceries, and—hallelujah!—found a functional Internet café, where we immersed ourselves for an hour, not coming up for air until every email was answered, every piece of spam deleted.

Dinner at the new hotel was a bugfest, but the steak was amazing. Rob and I discussed Anne Boelyn and the legal and logistical ramifications of a time machine. The volcano rumbled and belched, but it was hidden by persistent clouds that, despite many impassioned pleas to the lava gods, remained through the night. I hopped out of bed every hour to check, but in one of the bitterest disappointments of my life, saw nothing.

Stupid, stupid volcano.