Costa Rica: The Coastal Challenge

---

Skirting around the flanks of rumbling Arenal Volcano...

Jacqueline Windh / 25.01.2008

I have had a chance to review the rough maps outlining this year’s Coastal Challenge course, and I am starting to get nervous. You can take a look at the maps yourselves here: www.thecoastalchallenge.com/theroute/routeoverview.html. Some of the maps are labelled incorrectly in the key, but if you open each one up you can see the route and the nightly stops on each of them.

I knew we would start up around Monteverde and finish on the coast, so somehow I got it in my head that the route would be a kind of downhill glide...

Well, not so! We start in the town of La Fortuna, and skirt along the south flank of the active volcano Arenal, with a little 500m or so climb up Cerro Chato on the way, to finish Day 1 on the eastern end of Lake Arenal. The volcano glows red at night, so I am hoping for some clear skies that night!

I think I’ll be carrying my snakebite kit for this stage – I know some of the people who did the route-scouting around here for the Coast to Coast Adventure Race, and they say it is pretty snakey. (Venomous snakes are less of a worry in the higher country, which is too cool for them, and in the drier areas that we will encounter later on the race).See All Event Posts