Costa Rica Part II: Orosi

From Cartago, we took a bus to the village of Orosi. This next part of the trip was one of the highlights for me (along with monkeys and zip-lining, which will be in the next post, I promise!). It was great to get off the beaten path a bit and see some of rural and small-town Costa Rica. The trip to Orosi was my kind of traveling at its best, no strict itinerary, riding the bus around and talking to locals and other foreigners (Orosi had a surprisingly large American expatriate population for such a small village. We met three while we were there.), and just exploring and seeing what there is to see.

Orosi was a quiet little town (everything closed by about 9pm, including the local "night-life") situated along a river and between several mountains. The rich volcanic soil makes Orosi and the surrounding river valley a great place to grow all kinds of produce, including coffee, limes, and bananas. The colorful market across the street from our hotel, pictured below, sold local fruit of all sorts.




We stayed at the Hotel Reventazon, which is named after the river that runs alongside of Orosi. The proprietor of the hotel was an American expat who is building an earthship on one of the mountains near Orosi. He told us about a natural hot spring next to the river. Orosi is near Costa Rica's tallest volcano, and all of the geothermal energy from the volcano results in several natural hot springs in the area. Two of them have been turned into tourist attractions, but one is still just out in the open and is a popular spot with the Orosi locals. The hotel owner gave us directions to the springs that sounded fairly straightforward, and we set off on our adventure.

Hotel Reventazon

As per his instructions, we took a bus over a bridge and out of town. We got off the bus near the power plant and took the left fork in the road, towards the river. Then things got tricky. Our next instruction was to look for a hole in a barbed wire fence on the left side of the road, go through it and walk through a coffee plantation towards the river. We promptly found a hole in barbed wire fence and veered off on a trail towards the river.

A bridge over the Reventazon River outside of Orosi (note: if you come to this bridge, you are NOT on the right track to finding the hot springs)


We weren't entirely sure that we were on the right track, but with our list of instructions and the river as a reliable landmark, we were confident that we would find the spring. In the meantime, we found a lot of other things:

Rainbow trees

Lime groves

Coffee plants

A long caravan of leaf-cutter ants taking their bounty back to the colony


We must have walked around for at least two full hours, trying one path after another, without finding any hot springs. We quickly learned that holes in barbed wire fences were pretty thick on the ground in Orosi. We tried several of them, all of the paths either dead-ending or stopping at the river with no hot springs to be seen. Time after time, we said to one another "This looks promising. I think this is the path he told us about." After so many wrong turns, we were beginning to think that we'd have to turn back without finding the hot springs.

Luckily we ran into some people to ask for further directions. Mike got to practice his Spanish asking passers-by where the "aguas callientes" were, while I stood by and paid close attention to the hand gestures and listened for cognates. With a little help, and quite a bit more walking (with a few more wrong turns), we were successful! We finally found a warm pool alongside the river, with two Tico men lounging in it:



Relaxing in the hot water was exactly what we needed after our long walk. And finally finding the spring was even sweeter after all that we went through on our way there!


The next day, we went on a hike up a nearby mountain before heading back to San Jose to meet up with Mike's family for the next leg of the trip. On our way up the mountain, we got to see some more of the local flora, a beautiful, if a bit foggy view of the town, and a few little waterfalls.



Plantains!