We arrived in La Fortuna yesterday after a very frustrating journey: we had to leave at 7am, which meant no breakfast, and then had to wait for around two hours without explanation to change buses, and then arrived at around 13:30 to find a bunch of poor hotels in a dirtstrip town. On top of that, we had a rubbish lunch at a Lonely Planet-recommended diner (reminder for self: Lonely Planet is not written by people like me) and my sunburn on my shoulders meant that carrying my pack was a minor torture. Oh, and it rained for 10 minutes out of every 30 from well before we arrived. But after we checked them all out, we settled on the first hotel we saw and we have some pretty good rooms for $14 per person per night.

And so today, at 5am I woke up to check out the volcano: La Fortuna is 6km from an active volcano, but naturally under cloud cover most of the time. But at 5am, the cloud cover receded steadily until the smoking peak was visible. With the sun colouring the fleeing clouds pink, it was quite a sight indeed. That afternoon, after the dish o the day at a different diner (chicken with cheese and tomato sauce), we hit th rainforest. Now the rainforest has its name for a reason, and true to form, as soon as we got into the trees, the skies opened! We huddled in a tunnel for a little while, but even after the rain had stopped, the trees kept dripping. Despite the wet, it was memerising - the place was just so absurdly vital. The soil looked rich enough to eat, and everywhere there was something growing, moving, eating, hunting, or in the case of the leafcutters, farming. Rather than just getting a taxi there, we booked a tour for the four of us, and our guide was a charming Tico called Donald ('Like the Duck!') and he really seemed to know his stuff. Despite a lifetime of Attenborough addiction, I didn't know that leafcutter ants chop the leaves and bring them back to the nest where they are mixed with ant poop to form food for a fungus. What a wild evolutionary adaptation! We didn't see many large animals, although I suppose that's not so surprising since they are unlikely to be keen on being seen by 80 kilo hunters.

Despite the absence of prowling jaguars and ocelots, it was a hugely enjoyable trek. Along the way we saw a troop of arboreal mammals - they were about a metre from nose to tail and looked like kinkajou but were more stripy - which had learned to beg food off the cars going by. They'll all be diabetic soon judging by the number of sweets being thrown out to them. Nevertheless, it was fun to stop and watch them running from car to car, and slightly scary to see them start to climb a woman's dungarees because they saw that she had food in a bag - therein lies the lesson. After the trek was over, we watched transfixed as the clouds rolled over the surrounding countryside, and just as they reached us, it started to chuck it down again.