Rio Celeste

We had lots of fun with my parents in town. We wrapped up the week with them by hitting a another beach with some great tide pools and interesting sea life.

We also had some time to knock out a few projects on the bus list, like repairing a couple of closet shelves and a thorough cleaning.

More importantly, we managed to get to my parents back to the airport without breaking down.

We had been waiting for our return to Liberia to get some new front tires, so this was our chance.  We met up with Doug and went to get new tires, where the tire guy told us our front right axle nut was really hot. He wouldn’t fix it, so we pulled out with our new tires and fixed it in his parking lot.

Jason had to take it apart and apply lots of grasa to the front bearings and make sure things were adjusted properly and we were on our way. I was glad that it wasn’t with my parents waiting to catch a flight.

We finally got on the road and headed up to Rio Celeste. There is a national park near here that is about 15 miles down a dirt country road, so we went looking for it. Again, we were warned it was 4×4 only, but we had no problems.

We heard a lady offers camping in her front yard, so we went to investigate. Sure enough, it was just her front yard and she wanted to charge us quite a bit for the privilege, so we passed on it. We drove around a bit more following hand-painted wooden signs for cabinas until we found accommodations in what Doug referred to as ‘the halfway house’.

The house was in a lovely valley, but was a muddy hike from the car. It had a bathroom, but no sink in it. The kitchen had a sink and a refrigerator, but no stove or cooking equipment. The walls didn’t quite go all the way to the ceiling. But, it was cheap and that is our usual criteria.

I was putting Bode to bed in one of the rooms when we heard Doug screaming about a giant spider coming up through the shower drain. Neither Bode nor I really wanted to go check it out, so we just decided to pretend we were asleep. Poor Doug.

We were 3 km from the park entrance, which featured an enormous variety of creepy crawly dead things in jars. The hike to the falls was only 2 kilometers, but Jason had sprained his ankle back in Montezuma and it seemed to be getting worse. He waited in the car with his leg up while the rest of us set out down the trail. What they didn’t tell us was the last kilometer involved sliding down a very steep muddy mountain. It was all we could do to keep from sliding all the way down to the bottom and by the end we were covered in dirt and mud. It was worth it.

The water color here is the same shade as the sky. The legend has it that when God was painting the sky, he dipped his brush to clean it into the water at Rio Celeste. It really was pretty amazing.