We were a little amazed when we got into San Carlos (it was recently renamed Cuidad Quesado but no one calls it that). Most of the towns we had seen since Alajuela had been very small--on the order of 1,000 or 2,000 people. I'm not sure how many people San Carlos has, but I'd guess more than 10k. It went on for blocks and blocks. It had stores selling refrigerators and electronics and saddles. I kept wondering where all the money came from. Our guidebook, which is three years old (despite the fact that it says it was revised last year), doesn't mention much about the town, except to say that it's in the heart of the country's agricultural area.

As usual, we got lost on our entry into the city, and had to ask several people and bicycle around in circles for more than 30 minutes to find our hotel. It was next to a pool. We ended up renting a true cabina--a stand alone cabin, albeit standing next door to several other cabins--for 2,000 colones. It was bigger than our apartment in San Francisco. It had a huge living room (with tons of beds, which seems to be a hallmark of Costa Rican hotel rooms), a dinette kitchen, a nice little bathroom and a bedroom we could have ridden our bicycles in.

It was also totally remote--way off at the fringe of the town, so we weren't likely to hear lots of noise, which had plagued us in almost every other place we stayed. We were very very psyched. Then, in the middle of our little bubble of paradise, came the bad news. Our hotel was also home to a booming disco, and the music was starting . The bass alone sounded like a train roaring through our little cabina. The music was pretty bad. At some point it degenerated into a medley of English language songs. like Queen's Another One Bites the Dust and Pink Floyd's We Don't Need No Education. Nice songs on their own, but the medley was awful.

I had been looking forward to lazing around in the quiet, but with all that noise we decided to explore the town for the evening. We walked several blacks uphill to the main streets, watched a karaoke gathering in a public square for a little bit. The first singer, a woman decked out in glitzy rodeo garb, sort of like you'd expect to see on Lawrence Welk, was great. But then an announcer kept rattling on, so we decided to leave.

Soon we found a great way to kill time: a pool hall! The owner was very happy to see us. He ushered us in explained that it was 400 colones ($1.75) for an hour, and even racked up our balls for us. Eric tore up the table, sinking balls all over the place. I finally came into my own just as our time was ending. It was a nice little respite.

Luckily, the disco music stopped around 11 p.m., just a little while after we returned.

The next day we set out for Fortuna, a little tourist-oriented town that's close to Volcan Arenal, an active volcano that killed 82 or 132 people (we read both figures) during an eruption in 1968. Currently it just spews lava and rumbles a bit. A lot of people go to Fortuna hoping to see some of the red lava lighting up the sky.

Promise of lava had put Fortuna on our itinerary early. But alas, I had misread the guidebook. For some reason, I thought you could see the lava while you were drinking cervezas in Fortuna. But NO. To see the lava, you have to go a ways up the volcano, and then hope the fog lifts as you can actually see something. Worse: you have to pay US$15 a head for admission to the volcano park.

Eric and I didn't know this when we rolled into town. We got a place to stay for 2500 colones a night, found a place that served batidos and beer, and then found out the awful truth about lava accessibility.

We decided to bite the bullet and pay for a guided tour. We had been riding pretty hard since Limon, so we figured we'd take Sept. 21 off, and get a guide to bring us up the volcano, so we could see some lava. The tours are $23 a head, including the admission fee.

We'll get to the tour in a second, but perhaps even more memorable for us is the fact that on Sept. 21, we actually got some laundry done. The last time we'd done our laundry was in Carlsbad, Calif., on Sept. Since then we had tried to wash our clothes in sinks, and dry them by hanging them out on a rope that we'd hand up in our humid hotel rooms. Our first night in Fortuna Eric had a nightmare involving laundry. The next morning, we went to a drop-off laundry service that did our entire small but extremely grimy batch of clothes for 850 colones. It was totally worth it. (Little did we know then that we would repeat the same sink-nightmare-laundry service cycle for the next two years, all over the world).

The tour was great fun. Some Costa Rican guides, Felix and Alvaro, picked us up in an air conditioned minivan, and then brought us and six others up the mountain, We hiked around, saw howler monkeys and a white faced spider monkey in the jungle near the volcano, and hiked around a bit on the rubble. On the drive back, the van suddenly pulled over to the side so we could see...a reddish glow in the fog, which as the reflection of the lava. all eight of us tourists pressed our faces against the window to get a look, That's as close as we got to the lava.

Also on the way back, we stopped at some Volcano hot spring. There was a very expensive fancy totally landscaped resort place called Taboacan, that charges $14 a person, and then there was a cheap place for $5 across the street. since we only had an hour, we went to the cheap place. We sat peacefully in hot water until some small children came romping through, splashing and screaming. They reminded me of the merits of birth control.

Next: Paradise for $14.

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