Day 6 - A Bit More Challenging Hike

We set aside day 6 to do a hike on our own and ended up choosing one that challenged us as much as possible.  It was a hike from our room to Cerra Chato, which is an older dormant volcano where the crater has been filled in with greenish-blue water.  Our guide from the previous days walk warned us that it was a tough hike with the last mile up to the crater being equivalent to a mile long climb up stair steps.  He was right, but in this case the stair steps were made of rocks, tree's, dirt, and mud, ranging anywhere from 6 inches to 2 feet tall.  We decided to tackle it anyway on the premise that if it got too tough we could just quit and go back.  The problem with that thinking is that by the time you've started up a climb like that, you're mentally committed to going the whole way.

It was 1.5 miles of easy walking from our room to the base of the trail.   Actually, it was easy on the way there.  It was a long Long LONG 1.5 miles after the hike to the top.

 

On a side note, they grow a lot of eucalyptus tree's in Costa which are not native to the area.  They do so to harvest the wood so they don't have to harvest wood from the rain forest.  We passed this grove of tree's on our way up to the path.  To give an indication on how lucky we were the day before, this is looking directly back at the Arena volcano which you can barely see it's lower left slope.  The remaining portion of the volcano was covered all day by thick clouds.

And then the real fun began.  A mile doesn't sound like much, but it can seem like 5 miles under these circumstances.

 

When we were perhaps 200 yards short of the summit (although we didn't know that at the time) we heard voices approaching us from behind.  As we stood off to the side a tour group of 8 German hikers passed us walking as if this was just a stroll in the park.  Meanwhile, Tina and I were breathing heavy, drenched in sweat from head to toe, and with a ton of mud covering our pants just for good measure. 

Fortunately, the Germans spurred us on to finish what we'd started and afforded us the opportunity to get our picture taken at the top.

And our reward for reaching the summit was the view on the left.  The view on the right was from somebodies blog who obviously chose a much better day to climb Cerro Chato than we did!

 

And then, after some long drinks of water and a few energy bars, we headed back down which was not much easier than going up.  Fortunately it uses a completely different set of muscles than the climbing up part otherwise we might still be stuck up at the cloudy top.

 

We made it back shortly after noon and spent the entire afternoon lounging out at the pool and jacuzzi.  We had planned on doing a tour the lodge offers that does an evening walk through the national forest here to some of the recent lava flow fields.  When the time came to leave we were both of the mindset that we'd had plenty of walking for the day.   Until next time ...