Day 10: Death hike to Cerro Chato Lagoon

The hike to Cerro Chato was definitely a well thought out trip considering it was the most intense hike we went on in Costa Rica.  I planned on starting my own geocache up there, and was well aware before hand of what the hike entailed.  Cerra Chato is the dormant volcano next to the active Arenal, that has a lagoon were the crater would be.

The hike started out and the same area as the La Catarata waterfall from yesterday, again it was around $10 per person.  At least this time I could justify the $20 because the hike took a good part of the day.  Too be honest with you, I was a little disappointed at first.  The hike was a little grass path flanked with bushes and flowers.  I guess I pictured it to be a more intense hike...boy was I wrong.

We started the hike off pretty slow at first because it was straight up, but again it was fairly easy because the road was pretty well maintained.  We made it to a little flat stopping point with an awesome vista.  Thats when the hike started to get intense...once we hit the trees, the stairs were ON!  I swear it was never ending!    I thought we were at the top about 5 times.  Ugh.  It was seriously humid and we were doing some serious sweating.

It was so worth it once we made it to the top!  The views were breath taking and the lagoon was perfect.  There were frogs everywhere, and I mean everywhere...in the water, on our toes, on the trees, hoping everywhere!  We didnt do any swimming, but went calf deef to cool off.  We had lunch up there and cooled off for a little while, before hiking back up to the top to hike back off the volcano.

We decided the best spot for our geocache was the stopping point at the highest part of the hike, just before you drop down into the lagoon.  We found a hiding spot at the base of a tree under some roots.  Right when we were placing the geocache someone was coming up from the lagoon too.  I felt weird placing the cache when people were watching, so we idled for a little while waiting for them to leave.  Right when I felt comfortable we had hid it well enough, a coati jumped out of the bushes and scared the crap out of Jeremy and I!  The guy looked like a huge version of Ron!  He sniffed around our bags and walked around the area for a good 5 minutes before we shooed him away.

The way back down was amazing.  I think in part because it was downhill and we could actually enjoy the scenery.  Jeremy did stick his hand on a gigantic spikey green scary bug thing, I seriously have a pretty high tolerance for bugs and such, but this thing made me scream like a little girl...I high tailed it down the mountain.  He started to fall and put his hand down and the thing spiked him right in the finger making him bleed, I was a little scared for a little bit cause we both didnt know what it was or if it was poisonous.

We didnt see any monkey or any cool big birds, but the place was full of ants.  I started to call them the ant highways, they had used some of the trails so much that there were little paths of dirt leading straight to their ant hills.  Some of the plants were completely eaten by the ants, once they were finished they would move to the next plant until that plant was all gone too.

The whole trip took around 3(ish) hours to get up, but took about 30 minutes to get back down.  Once down we caught a cab back to the hostel and took a nap because we were beat!  We ended the night doing a little shopping in town and had a huge banana split in a pineapple at the place right next to the hostel.