(Costa Rica) – Day 3, Part 5 – April 25th, 2009

Such wide open space..

The long walk to the best viewpoint. You can’t tell, but it clouded over pretty quickly… also it was windy and thus a little chilly.

One of the side craters, not the main one but I have a cool timelapse video of the clouds and the shadows they left as they passed by. Click on the picture to see the link for the video.

The crater and the lake inside Volcan Irazu.  It’s green because of the sulfur…I thought it would have been yellow?! Anyways, it’s actually a very beautiful green.

Getting these pictures was kind of tough, the fence keeping people back is actually very far so I had to straddle it and lean over just to see some of the lake.

Stitched a vertical pano of 5 images together for this one. Should have taken more to make it wider. :

Before I left, I bought the gorillapod. It came in handy a lot for taking family pictures, and for setting up my point and shoot for timelapses (like this one below), but I didn’t like using it with my 30D since it’s too heavy..and it wasn’t easy to manouvre around. I could have bought a ballhead, but that’s just more money that I don’t have to spend and it makes the “tripod” weaker.

Look at this big hill we had to climb…..haha. It’s actually me just getting really low and close to some of the features on the land…..love this lens (Tokina 11-16)!

Stopped in the tourist shop to take a quick look around.

Then we took the short but VERY bumpy road full of potholes up to the higher observation point. You can’t even see the lake from here!! What a joke. That and you can see it’s started to cloud over a lot. :/

This was cool though, just a building there out of nothing. I’m about 90% sure it was an observation point, but it’s not in use anymore. Looks so strange and foreign in the landscape…