Irazú: the crater lake you can drive to

Costa Rica has a volcano you do not have to climb. You drive up Irazú, park near the top, walk a few minutes,
and look down into the crater.

What is in it is a lake, and the lake is the reason to come. It sits at the bottom of a steep bowl of bare grey ash,
and it is a colour that does not look like it belongs there – a flat mineral green-blue, quite unlike water anywhere
else on the trip, with nothing growing anywhere near it. The bowl above it is completely stripped. After days of
rainforest so dense you cannot see through it, arriving somewhere with no vegetation at all is a genuine shock, and
that contrast is most of the experience.

The other thing nobody tells you is the cold. This is the highest volcano in the country and the summit is a long way
above the valley you drove out of. You leave in shirtsleeves and arrive somewhere with wind in it. Bring more than you
think, and be ready for the whole thing to be inside a cloud, because at that height it frequently is and there is
nothing to be done about it.

It makes an easy half day out of the capital, which is the other argument for it – San José itself gives you very
little, and this gets you out of it and back. If you have already stood on the rim of a live crater somewhere else,
Irazú will feel calm by comparison; there is no smoke and no glow, just a very large hole with a strange lake in it.
That is enough. Not every volcano has to be dangerous to be worth the drive.