The Rancho Amalia cabins were in a lovely setting, with incredible views; cosy with a wood fire. The problem at night time were the trucks. The main road wasn’t far away and it wound around the valley such that you could hear each truck for ages as it made its way round the bends. These were big American-style trucks, with no silencers on their exhausts because they are driven by macho men who like to make a lot of noise when they are on the roads. I still had jet lag so once I’d woke up at 3 am I had a couple of hours listening to the trucks.
I finally got up at 6 am just after dawn. The view was lovely. Perfect to sit with a cup of coffee and admire.
This is Jenny with her cup of coffee admiring the view and this is our cabin – a perfect mountain retreat.
We had an authentic Costa Rican breakfast at the ranch’s restaurant. This was fruit to start with, then rice and beans, scrambled egg, cheese and plantain. Plus lots of coffee, possibly from Rancho Amalia’s own coffee plants.
One of the other reasons we wanted to stay at Rancho Amalia, as well as visiting the topiary gardens, was the horse riding. Sarah and I have more horse riding planned later in the tour but this was Jenny’s chance to do some Costa Rican riding. These are the poor unsuspecting creatures who were taking us out.
..and here we are ready to set off. Apparently, I ride like a sack of potatoes, so no more pictures of me riding.
Up we go into the high pastures…
…where some people have to work for a living. This group are bringing in the potato harvest, tilling the soil by hand. Hard work.
As usual, Sarah gets the cheeky pony at the back…
Her pony was so naughty that it got moved into second position behind the leader. Still it refused to follow closely.
By the time we got back it was pouring with rain. It was only supposed to rain in the afternoon, but these are the mountains, and as everyone keeps telling us this is the rainy season. This didn’t stop it being a lovely ride.
Horse riding is a wonderful way to experience a landscape. It is so much easier than walking and faster, with a better vantage point. Imagine we’d done a two hour hike in the rain. Would we have come back as happy? I don’t think so.
It was time for a late morning coffee. We headed into Zarcero. This was the perfect opportunity to admire the topiary gardens in the daylight. They were quite remarkable – quite a commitment to one person[s vision which other people have been inspired to maintain. New sculptures were taking shape alongside these old classics.
Opposite the park, across the main road was a little bakery doing coffee. It may have been a simple-looking place but they served the coffee with style – our first experience of this being done the traditional way, with coffee filtering through a bag straight into the cup.
As you can see, I deserved a doughnut after all that horse riding exertion.
For our afternoon excursion we planned to visit a “local” waterfall, over an hour’s drive away. As it turned out the drive was as much part of the experience as the waterfall visit was.
The road went up into the mountains from Zarcero, then descended in hairpins before the road disappeared into a stony, rutted unmade road. This was the only route linking our side of the mountain to the other.
The waterfall, the Rio Agrio Falls, was situated in Dinoland. That is indeed a park filled with dinosaurs – sadly artificial ones. Costa Rica does not have a real Jurassic Park yet. Bound to happen though.
A lot of money had been spent on the visitor centre, not quite so much on the artificial dinosaurs. This all meant we had to pay an entrance fee to see the falls.
We didn’t spend a lot of time visiting the dinosaurs. Instead, we made our way up to a viewpoint to eat some rolls we’d brought for lunch, just as the cloud rolled in. Those alluring, tree-clad peaks that had surrounded us moments before, were less shrouded in mist, more obscured by fog.
The lead up to the waterfall was through a gorge that was straight out of Jurassic Park. With the sound of a roaring T.Rex in the distance it was tempting to look up in case there were pteradactyls in the sky.
A teaser falls to the left suggested we might be in for a disappointment, but as we came out of the gorge into the amphitheatre proper, the full force of the falls was roaring away in front of us. It was a spectacular sight.
How about with a bit of a long exposure?
Jenny drove back. It started to rain heavily, then it got dark. Why did she always get to do the driving in the rain just as it is getting dark? she asked. She had to drive up the rutted stony track and then do all the hairpins uphill. Visibility dropped to nothing as we drove up into the rainclouds. She managed to work out where the fog lights were while she was going round the curves.
Back at the cabins we settled in for a long evening. We had a few beers, and I made up the nacho starters, very easy really with smashed avocado, refried black beans (a Latin American thing strangely tasting like pate), and olives. All I had to do really was set it out nicely. Jenny did fire lighting duties.
Jenny looked after dinner preparation. She is very useful to have around. She poached the chicken then shredded it with peppers, onions and olives. She made a very nice salsa from tomatoes, onion and coriander, and heatd up the tortillas in the microwave. In the end, we had a rather nice dinner with tonight’s bottle of wine.
We had originally planned to spend three nights at the cabins but one of the things we really wanted to while were were in the central mountains was see Volcan Poas. This wasn’t really feasible from Rancho Amalia because it was over an hour’s drive away and the idea with the volcano is to get there early so you can see them before the clouds come in. We thought we ought to take the car back too, instead of putting up with it making a strange noise for another two weeks, so we looked for some accommodation near Poas for the following night.
Jenny found us some mountain accommodation – another cabin on a farm down a kilometre of track that needed a 4WD to get to. Well, our car is a 4WD so that should be fine shouldn’t it…