Middle-aged flash packers

Poas seemed to have a theme of waiting. Waiting for the day to pass, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the gates to the national park to open.
Unfortunately there was to be no viewing of the volcano crater as the cloud cover was just too thick. The clouds hid a bubbling, green lake inside the volcano, which we had intended as our final highlight of Costa Rica.
Not much else to do here, well actually NOTHING else to do, so we filled our last full day with a visit to Sarchi, famous for its painted ox carts.
In all honesty, besides a pretty town square and picturesque church, Sarchi’s charms are limited. However, we stumbled on a sign for some botanical gardens and after some detective work, eventually found them. Fabulous. Talk about understated. Absolutely beautiful, well tended gardens.There were two other people wandering about, otherwise we had the whole place to ourselves. The guy on the cash desk was surprised and delighted to see us. A well kept secret indeed.
Our next attempt at getting off the beaten track was not so successful. On the internet I had found directions to a 90m waterfall, which was about 20 kilometres from Sarchi. We started ascending a very windy road which became narrow without any barriers to protect us from a steep drop on one side and landslips on the other. After one hairpin bend after another I began to feel quite panicky as it seemed the road was literally vertical and I could see clouds begin to roll in. We decided to abandon our trip as rain would have made this less of an adventure and more of a fools journey.
In conclusion, Poas was a bit of an anti climax to end our Costa Rican adventure on, but that’s travel for you and at least it left us a short drive to the airport.