Trip to Volcan Irazu

During our training, which ended just last week, we were only allowed two nights spent out of our site (besides visiting a current Volunteer and visiting our sites and future host families). The limit of two nights was put into place so that we would spend more time integrating with our training families and the community, which we were supposed to do in order to be better prepared to repeat the process in our actual sites. So, a day trip was planned. I can’t emphasize enough how awesome it is to get trips planned by someone else. Although I do love the adventure of traveling in a foreign country, trying to get on the right bus, find the entrance to the museum, not offend the locals with my apparel, and all that jazz. Yet, I can’t deny how great it is to just be told to bring a lunch, show up at eight, and if I show up at eight, the worrying is over.

Kyle K. from Melbourne, FL is a really energetic, humorous, self-deprecating fellow Volunteer. His training host family was awesome (unless he told all lies) and his host dad was quite charismatic and gregarious (my judgments). Even better was that he had a somewhat Asian-esque mustache and always rocked a hip Quicksilver hat. Well, Arturo is his name, and Arturo planned a trip to Volcan Irazu for all of us trainees that wanted to attend. We (about 25 trainees and the families of maybe 10 of those) took a private bus to the volcano, one of the four active in Costa Rica, and the tallest of all Costa Rican volcanoes. Undoubtedly, the best thing about the day was the view from the top of the volcano. I walked up to the top with Barton R., a fellow Volunteer from Ventura, CA. Barton is among a good share of Volunteers who have Peace Corps in their blood. His parents met in Fiji, where his mother was a Volunteer and his father was keeping the Peace Corps dream alive, serving a second term after completing one in Thailand. On this topic, Kelsey I., another girl from my training community, is the daughter of a couple that met when they were both serving as Peace Corps Volunteers in…yes, believe it, Costa Rica.

Back to the sulfur and craters, Barton and I walked up to the highest point on the volcano, a ridge above the main craters, and took in a gorgeous view of layers of clouds above rich, green hills, meeting in the distance with the Pacific Ocean. Barton, being from California, might not have been impressed, but for me it was one of the more wondrous landscapes I’ve seen. On the other side of the proverbial coin were the clouds on the Atlantic side that blocked full views of the crater and the Atlantic Ocean. Volcan Irazu is among a few peaks in Costa Rica, which possess this quite unique quality: on a clear day you can see the world’s two largest oceans from them. Unfortunately as well, the main crater, with odorous sulfur coming off it, can not be fully appreciated from the views on the main plateau that sits atop the mountain-it declines too steeply to allow one to see much of it. After the Volcano, we also enjoyed a nice walk among the countryside on the road down the mountain-as I passed on paying to enter a “haunted” former sanitarium. I was actually criticized for my defiant refusal of any belief in ghosts. I guess I was wrong in thinking that belief in ghosts and the like went out of style a few centuries ago.

Without an entry fee, and much more entertaining than anything in the “haunted” sanitarium could’ve been were our frequent stops on the way home. Queso fresco (queso blanco) is superlatively popular here, and used in empanadas and cheese tortillas-two of the most popular Costa Rican breakfast and snack foods. Apparently, the highlands leading up to Volcan Irazu make great queso fresco, as we stopped four or five times to check the quality and prices of cheese vendors. I’d say roadside vendors, as two or three of them were, but not all. That’s because, I have noticed, that with some agricultural products, especially queso fresco, farmers will just paint “vende queso” (‘cheese sold here’) on a piece of plywood and lay it at their gate. So, our bus would stop, one of the training family parents would get out, walk up to the house, inquire about the cheese, walk back to the bus accompanied by a man with plastic bags full of blocks of cheese, and then some bidding and shouting would go on through the bus windows, cheese would or would not be sold, and we’d be on our merry little way. I think some of the other trainees might have been annoyed; I was nothing but amazed and entertained.