Climbing the Active Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica

You can see these massive lava fields here and that epic view in the background. Good morning and welcome back to Costa Rica. I'm staying here at the Casa Luna hotel and I've just spent a pretty beautiful morning by the pool watching Chelsea, my football team, from back It's actually pretty nice because it's minus seven hours here from UK right now so I get to watch it in the morning before going and doing other things. Which brings me to we're about to head off and climb the Arenal volcano which you can see from everywhere in La Fortuna. There's an awesome view from here from the Casa Luna to Arenal and now I'm gonna go and head up it. I'm pretty much gonna cut straight to that but first have this. Now about to head off on a hike up the Arenal volcano with Eco Terra Tours. I don't really know a lot about this other than we should get a good viewpoint, a good hike which I'm always up for, and hopefully some wildlife. Okay this is where we're beginning the hike from and we're going up there. I just found out it was active from 1968 till 2010 and the last big eruption was 2010 so only about 10 years ago there was a big eruption down the side of the mountain so there's still lots of volcanic rock and hardened lava. It should be cool there's also wildlife here we're going to go see what we can find. Now this volcano before 2010 we used to have lava coming out every day so this is actually what people they used to see every day right here okay. We're hiking now to the first big eruption which was in 1968 and apparently before that point no one really knew it was a volcano so the massive eruption took a lot of people by surprise. No. Loads of leaf cut arounds. I would not want to be stuck here. So the reason why they call it a sandy volcano is because volcano is very sandy it's just like this okay so that's why it's not allowed to go up there and it's actually very steep and very slippery so that's why it's not allowed to go on top. Also look at the size of this rock right here. This rock is a lava bomb so this rock came flying from the volcano. Check it out you see just massive lava fields here and that epic view in the background. Look at this it's cool. So our guide was just explaining as well that all of Costa Rica now for the last few years runs off renewable energy and they have a commitment to become carbon neutral as well completely and interestingly some of that energy is now being produced by volcanoes. Not specifically this one but there's another volcano that way which I forget the name of that has a massive geothermal plant. There's also in the distance there you can see some big windmills for wind energy. There's the lake there which I think also produces energy. Yeah so that's interesting it just seems like the whole country is going in that direction. So that viewpoint is as high as we're allowed to go on the volcano. We can't climb any higher legally. We're not going to do that other route. We're heading back down now and trying to see if we can spot some toucans. A little green hummingbird. Oh yeah the Kill Bill one. Cool. Yeah that's cool on the way down we just found a toucan in the trees. The only real way you can see it right now is through the binoculars over there but still really cool. It's somewhere there. Yeah really interesting. That's the highest you can go legally up to the top of the volcano. You're not allowed to go to the summit here at least right now. Apparently it's still too dangerous and they just don't allow it. So that's as high as we can go up that volcano, Arenal volcano, and got a really cool view plus some really interesting information as well from our guide. How prehistoric does some of this look? And one of the reasons I say that is because a lot of the plants here are and for that reason some of Jurassic Park was filmed here as well. I think a lot of it was filmed in Hawaii but I was told that also some was filmed here and you do get that sense walking through these places. And back to the entrance. And that is it finished. Another really cool tour from Hikotera adventures and yeah just really interesting. I'm loving having guides showing us around this place because you get to just find out so much more. It's something I didn't used to do as much as I'm doing now. I think just having a proper guide, he's got like 11 years of experience of being around here. You can see things that you can't see on your own and just a really cool way of doing it. For now I'll just say again thank you for watching and Pura Vida!