Code|Beta

This is a pretty long post that will contain several images so you’ll have to click the read more link at the bottom to view the rest of the images…this is because I don’t want to annoy our friends over at the NYLUG group who pull our RSS feed for their NYLUG Planet page

Well like I mentioned on my last blog post last weekend I took a trip with my family to the Irazu Volcano in Costa Rica. It’s been a very long couple of years since I’ve been there and the last time I was there…well it was when I was a baby so it’s really quite difficult to actually tell if it was any different…or I could ask my parents

I don’t exactly know what it is about volcanoes that attracts people so much since all they are is simply a crater filled with water, not always though, and in some cases smell really bad…not to mention the cold weather one isn’t used to though it’s really due to the windy conditions in those high altitudes.

Spectators of the crater

I’m not much of a historian but it appears that the whole fencing was redone since you could see what appears to be remains of a fence and also some remains of walls.

What remains of the wall

Rusted remains of what appears to be the old fence

In most places there are some signs that explain the history of the place but it appears that this is not the rule and that it doesn’t just apply for the tourist places but to the roads as well since there are hardly any road signs that point the roads that can take you to the tourist attractions.

The current fence which is made of wood goes half way around the crater since it appears nearly impossible to reach the other side though I guess that if you see the crater from one angle you can pretty much picture the other angle…not really hard to imagine

A view of the crater and the vegetation around it

It’s quite interesting to see the vegetation growing on one side of the crater and not as much on the outside surrounding areas…ok so it does seem that there could be some added value to seeing the crater from the other angle…though you’ll still see a lot of vegetation around. The plants on the foreground, I’m not a biologist or botanist or know what the scientific name of these are, are often refered to as the poor man’s umbrella and the only places I’ve seen them are in the volcanoes and places where there is a lot of rainfall. If I remember correctly the biology classes the big amount of rainfall is a factor in them having such huge leaves.

Raccoons are on the side of the road waiting for people to feed them

These small animals play near the road where the cars go by because people will throw them food and this has definitely caused some issues with nature but people just love giving them whatever they can give them. I saw one person giving them chocolate cookies. I got out of the car to take some photos and the above one is one of the best ones though you can’t really see the face of the animals.

But before you actually get to the volcano site you can see the best sight of the city of Cartago and it must be amazing at night with all the lights but we didn’t stay up there that late so this is what it looked like:

Cartago from high in the mountain

There were a lot of these yellow flowers that would dance to the rhythm of the wind

There are also a lot of old houses around the areas and also a lot of vegetation and vegetables being grown

On our way back we stopped by a restaurant that appears to be quite famous since it has most of it’s walls covered in business cards, identification cards of schools and country IDs, also shirts, photos and napkins with names of people that have been at the restaurant.

Business cards are what most leave and they date back to 1992 or even older

After lunch I took a quick walk near and around the restaurant to get these photos:

This is the balcony at the back of the restaurant

Moss grows in abundance in this climate and the fences are no exception

On the back of the restaurant there was this small house

I still need to finish processing the photos from the Sanatorio Carlos Duran so expect those this week.

-LM