Arenal

i'm not exactly the hugest fan of large livestock. alright, fine. i may have a totally ungrounded and irrational fear of cows. they arent cute. they arent nice. i dont want to pet them. they are shifty-eyed and unpredictable. you never know what they could do next. one minute it could be happily chewing grass, they next you could be mauled. i've heard of it, cow maulings. when i was in high school our cross country course meandered through these rolling hills where cattle were always grazing. and, OK, so no one got mauled. or even chased. but I was convinced the cows were going to chase me. this paranoia also extends to horses to a lesser degree. i never shared that little girl dream of having my own horse or pony to pet and ride and feed apples and sugar cubes to. shifty-eyed horses. they're almost as bad as cows. its just like how i never wanted to participate in those ballet classes. I was always THAT girl in the class, sitting in the corner because the instructor didnt know what else to do with me. the instructor was also shifty-eyed. and you can never trust ballerinas. Ballerina maulings... you never know when you're going to have 40 pounds of toeshoes and bony eight year old elbows coming at you.

when i was 10 i was forced to participate in a girlscout horse camp over a long weekend. where we had to groom the horses, feed the horses, muck the stalls, sleep next to the barn, ride horses. and learn to vault. with 13 horse crazed, hair braiding, nail painting girls. my own private 10 year old hell. girlscouts are viscous, far worse than ballerinas. and all i got out of it was a lame badge with a horse on it, to supposedly sew on my shash. hmmm. i seem to have gotten off on a tangent... right. horses.

so when my friend Heather, that i met in OZ (JCU!), visited with her friend April (they both happen to be horse people) it was decided that we were going to ride horses at Arenal. this was met with a small amount of apprehension on my part. i dont believe i'd ridden a horse since the horse-camp days. and dont know the first thing about even getting on a horse. nonetheless, horseback riding we went. and it wasn't nearly as bad as i had anticipated, it was actually quite fun. we had 2 tico guides who saddled us up then took us off to a small zipline though a fragment of forest near their finca property. (one of the guides kept calling me muneca meaning either 'wrist' or 'doll' in spanish). while we were zipplining, however, a few of the horses decided to wander off, so afterward the guides chased them down and brought them back, and we went on about an hour ride through some forest and past fincas. through some streams. at one point one of the guides got off to open a barbed wire fence and his horse took off. so he hopped on my slow, fat pony with me to try and catch up to his horse. but my fat little pony refused to see any urgency in the situation and Heather eventually rounded up the other horse. my pony did eventually get up to cantering speed (much preferred to the trotting, during which i though i was going to fall off).

It was a great trip in Arenal, despite my being sick from something i caught in Nicaragua, then gave to Jennifer, who was also with us at Arenal. We went on a small hike through Arenal Park. Then relaxed at Bali Hotsprings with tropical drinks. We even had the great luck of seeing the volcano erupting our last night there. It was still drizzling that evening after dusk, but the clouds lifted and we could clearly see the volcano. so we piled into a car and headed off to the other side where you could heard the eruptions and see the lava oozing down the volcano. we stood there in the drizzle for a good hour, just watching. i had never seen an erupting volcano before. beautiful. the clouds eventually drifted back, hiding the volcano. but we could still hear the eruptions.