We walked to the bus stop and arrived well early as per usual. The bus was a little late and we got on our way at about 9:30am. We were a bit concerned as the lonely planet informed us that dense cloud cover tends to arrive at the crater at about 10 in the morning and as a result you might not be able to see anything. Obviously then, 10 minutes from the site, the bus driver stopped for a 15 minute break to have some breakfast. We were getting increasingly impatient.
When we finally arrived at the national park, all the passengers had to traipse off to individually purchase our entrance tickets meaning we only got to the road that led to the crater at 11:30. Sure enough when we finally reached the crater there was the densest of cloud cover and we couldn't see a damn thing although the sulfurous stink from the bubbling emissions below were well stinky.
I was a bit miffed as you can see below.
Heading down into the crater is strickedly prohibited.
We had to make the most of it mind, so Clairy was still super-gorgeous and super-cheerful.
Seeing as it didn't look like it was going to clear, we trotted off on the walking trial that headed off on a small hike round the park. We came across a few of these brown squirrels. They looked quite different to their grey and red cousins, though they were just as greedy.
After pegging it away from various noisy groups of schoolkids we eventually reached the Laguna Botos, a secondary crater lake. It was quite beautiful.
But soon enough, those pesky clouds started heading down...
Until it was completely obscured!
The trail took us around some very pretty dwarf cloud forest. Clairy loved all the air plants...
And ferns...
And she got this lovely picture of one of the air plants flowering.
Oh hi! All around were these vast leafy beasts apparently known as poor mans umbrellas.
After completing the trail, we perused the rather lacklustre gifte shoppe and than headed back up to the crater to see if it had cleared at all. Amazingly, it had! The pictures don't really convey the scale of it, but it was vast! The sulfurous steam was pouring out and you could hear the boiling lake hissing. This really made it worthwhile.
Stunning!
It was great the way the cloud slowly revealed the gurtness of it all.
Too quickly though, the cloud descended once more. While we waited quietly to see if it would clear again, various little creatures hopped around us. This little beauty is called a yellow-thighed finch. It took me ages to get a picture of it's comedy underside.
Walking back to the entrance you can see how cloudy and moist it was.
When we got back to the visitor centre we still has a couple of hours to kill so we thought we should check out the little museum. It had some rather sad displays about geology, but we stumbled upon a bizarre stand talking about environmentalism. We had absolutely no idea what these pictures were representing, but they made us chuckle none the less.
Hmmm.
1 comment:
I love those posters at the end, they're border-lining Emo! But still very true. I shouldn't mock really... :-(
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