Rio Celeste: The Bluest River? [PANAMERICAN HIGHWAY VANLIFE TRAVEL]

m opens up again at 8 00 a. m we’re gonna be able to check it out tomorrow we could have camped over in the national park but it would be about two thousand to six thousand colones and i mean we can camp for free right here with a view of the river so i might as well stay here good morning we’re about to head over to tenorio national park to learn more about this rio celeste and why it’s just such a beautiful blue color we’re super excited for this hike today oh we’re all packed up and ready to go look where this guy is up here you’re too cute my boy and then sombrita allowed either unfortunately but it’s nice and cool out here wow it would be sweet to see a taper fingers crossed we’re on the portion of the rio celeste hike where you just walk in a straight line until you get to the cool stuff it’s not muddy like some people said so far and we thought we’d tell you guys how we find all this stuff because that’s a really huge part of traveling is just knowing what you want to do and all that research the main way we do it is we have a google map where we save stuff it’s like a shared google map between both our phones and our computers so anytime we add a spot the other person can see it on their phone and when we’re going to a new area i’ll look at that map and then i’ll look at the map of ioverlander cross reference um ioverlander is an app for for finding spots to camp so but people also put in tourist attractions on it or little known places that they can go on the way our google map is also used for when people give us recommendations on where to go we’ll just put it in our google map and i usually write a note on who suggested it later on we can send them a picture or thank them so last night i was i was cross referencing the google maps the ioverlander and then trying to figure out i think we want to go scuba diving so hit up a ton of companies on whatsapp which is kind of the main way of communicating down here because you don’t have to use like texts or uh or minutes you just use your data plan and so then yeah you hit up a bunch of places you know and figure out how how you can book what they’re offering and then you’re good to go out here living the life and then the last resource i forgot to mention is travel books we like to get the travel books used they’re really cheap that way if the places are still around you know that they’re good and my uncle actually had a really good book we got to his place here and that’s the roamers my first fromers book i’ve had access to super high quality book all the animals and sites so that’s kind of step zero is looking through books and websites and putting that on the google map take all that back best way local recommendations whenever a local recommends something you better do it wow this is going to be a sweet path down to the waterfall i think really cool you ready to head down love yep 500 feet down and then back up wow you can really hear the roar of the waterfall coming up me this waterfall is definitely one of the main attractions of the park but i’m really excited to see up ahead where the water changes to the blue color and the explanation of that but wow this is a great waterfall it’s been raining lately so we were worried it might not be as blue but it’s looking really good next stop mirador wow past the waterfall here has been relentlessly uphill to get into this park it was twelve us dollars each eight or nine thousand colones and we also had to pay to park which was two thousand colonists so about three bucks all in all not a bad hike it looks like they’ve really conquered the mud problem that a lot of people talk about online by putting down gravel rock here and i was expecting something like cerro chateau where we were slogging through mud the whole way or the other day mirador in spanish means like a viewpoint a lookout and i guess it’s all covered by jungle but this is the volcano tenorio under the clouds there and a bunch of its craters should be visible here too um i guess here’s what it what it would look like so the first crater of tenorio second crater and then this montezuma crater over here well we’re pretty familiar with this after being in our now not being able to see the top but we did catch a peek of it at one point and down we go again yeah you can smell the volcano now and that’s part of why the water’s blue they call this part the blue lagoon wow this is even more colorful than below really beautiful here look how clear the water is now all we need is a little tapir to come in for a drink i feel like we’d be really in the middle of nowhere what do you think really beautiful how you can see through so easily wow this blue river is also a hot spring look at this bubbling churning water you kind of wish you could go for a dip you kind of wonder if you would die because it’s too hot maybe that’s why it’s not allowed this happens quite a bit at hot springs where the moss from the steam starts to grow on the rocks around it and for this river it just makes such a beautiful setting since the water is so blue the rocks are so green smells like chicken noodle soup hanging bridge we’re crossing right now the rivers that combine to create the rio celeste so you see here you don’t see the blue but you see boiling water right there ah another mud mitigation strategy well done park weather has become more unpredictable but we have not experienced mud so we were fine in our regular hiking shoes yeah so this one you can definitely tell is is a lot bluer than that last tributary wow this is impressive here you can see where the color of the river changes to be that beautiful blue the explanation is that this is a mixing point of two rivers you got one on the left there and one comes in here here’s the mixing point and this river is carrying a lot of uh aluminum silicates which is a particle formed by aluminum silicon and oxygen and here where the rivers mix for some reason the ph changes i guess one of these rivers must be more of a hot spring river and so here where they mix that causes those particles to enlarge because of the ph and a lot of them drop to the bottom or some of them you can see here like a white sediment on the bottom but the ones that remain in the water cause a optical phenomenon called my scattering and physics which creates the blue color kind of like when you look through rain in a rainbow the water gets split into different colors of light pretty crazy to see this point right here really interesting so we walked a little over two miles and now we’re gonna head back to the van and go back to the spot where we slept last night so we can go swimming in the free part of the river i read that the watercolor can come back in as quick as a couple hours after a heavy rain here so even if it’s rainy season you might be able to come check this place out that’s so cool really glad we came in the morning because it’s starting to rain and there’s quite a few people here yeah we’re gonna have to put away the camera but emily’s got this dry bag here and we got this uh rain cover for our other bags yeah should be fine back to the van let’s see our buddies he just popped right through there huh where’s grammy oh grammy’s still in his loft so right down the road from tendorio national park where we just were to check out the rio celeste is is a very nice swimming hole are you happy so yeah we can go for a swim now what do you think going for a swim yeah this spot’s here nice little rock pool we haven’t gone too far at all from the bridge already i’m loving it up here yeah maybe let’s go in a little further uh me time to head to our new campsite for the night unfortunately last night when i was trying to make some dinner the stove ran out of propane it happens every couple months uh traveling in the hot weather makes it happen a little bit less because we don’t really use the stove as much we run out of propane every two to three months so now we have to go and find a propane place so we gotta get this propane tank out here which is pretty simple we have this bar keeps all the stuff in i think we did that in mexico and then here this is what actually holds the propane uh so you have to do this part here oh easy this time so now danny’s gonna take the propane tank over to the guy to get refilled and i write on our little piece of paper how often we get propane whoa so we lasted three months this time so i guess at this spot they don’t let me go in there not sure if it’s due to covet or just safety i don’t mind at all i’m sure he’ll come back with the receipt and i’ll pay him then he knew exactly the size we got that tiny tank because it’s slightly more safe it’s not really safe to have a tank in your vehicle we always shut it off at the tank when we’re not cooking and that is the number one safety as well as we have a propane detector and a carbon monoxide detector so they actually had me go in there to pay it’s uh 1700 colonists about so that works out to be just three dollars to fill it which is what we’re accustomed to so now he handed me back the tank basically just put it back and test her out perfect there we go that’s some clean propane and then we shut it off down here usually whenever we first get propane the flame lasts a lot longer so yep that looks like we have a new tank and now it’s already off here now we shut it off here there’s no pain in the line so everything’s safe all right good job we’re good for another three months thank you guys so much for watching see you next time when we head over to the other costa rican coast.