Today in La Fortuna we decided to take a drive to Lake Arenal and stop at Mistico Hanging Bridges. You can go to the restaurant and get coffee without paying the entrance fee to the hanging bridges park. Frozen coffee was good and the traditional Tico breakfast was delicious as always; however, Hope tried a vanilla milkshake and she did not approve (it was more like ice milk with artificial sweetener). The best part was the incredible views of the volcano from our table at the restaurant.
The park entrance fee was about $30USD and it would have been closer to $50 for the guided tour, so we opted to go on our own again. I would highly recommend going to the park, we saw howler monkeys in a couple of different areas, a coati, a variety of lizards and snakes, great views of waterfalls and different trees, and the hanging bridges were very cool. The bridges are fully suspended so they bounce when walking across and there were guides at each bridge to limit the amount of people on the bridge at one time. There were also a couple of parts along the path where you could take a shortcut for anyone that didn’t want to walk the whole distance or didn’t want to cross as many bridges (but then you would also skip the waterfall). The kids did great walking the whole path, about 2 miles, and it took us about 2 hours to go through. they don’t want anyone in the park after dark so the last entrance is before 4pm.
One of the animals that the kids were really hoping to see was coati’s. On our drive out of Mistico, they lucked out and found them hanging out by the side of the road!!!
After Mistico we were going to drive around Lake Arenal but the road around the lake was not as scenic as we hoped and we ended up turning around pretty quick. We did head off the beaten path a little to check out the butterfly conservatory in El Castillo. This turned out to be a great find and Hope even had a butterfly land on her finger! After all the walking we were ready for another soak in the hot springs and an early bed time.
