Arenal and the hot river at Tabacón

Most hot springs are a pool with a gate on it. Tabacón is a river.

Water comes off Arenal already hot, and instead of being piped into a complex it is allowed to run downhill through
planted jungle, stepping over rock in a series of small falls with pools underneath them. You get in and work your way
up or down until you find a temperature and a strength of current you like. There are constructed edges in places and
it is unmistakably managed – this is not a secret – but the water is doing what water does, over rock, under trees,
in the open air. Sitting in a cascade with the forest closing over your head is a completely different proposition
from sitting in a rectangle.

Above it stands the volcano. Arenal is the postcard cone, and from the high ground around the lake it does the thing
postcard cones do: sits there being almost too symmetrical to be real, with cloud coming and going off the top. The
trails around its base run through old lava and forest, and none of them is long. You are not conquering anything.
You are walking about in the shadow of it for an afternoon.

Of everything I did in Costa Rica, this is the day where the price and the thing I got for it lined up most
convincingly. I spent a lot of that trip feeling I had paid a premium for something ordinary. Not here. The heat is
real, the volcano is real, and the combination of the two in one day is the strongest argument the country made to me.

If you are cutting a Costa Rica trip down and wondering what survives, this survives. Give it a full day, get in the
water in the morning while it is quiet, and let the afternoon go to the volcano.