We drove past a lot of different signs offering tours for La Leona Waterfall. It appears there are many places that offer tours. I didn't want to deal with people waving you down or trying to rip you off so I just looked online and found one with good reviews and a decent price and booked that. We got there and asked if we could quickly find food so they waited for us and another group to order food from the adjoining restaurant. Although we ordered sandwiches that were supposed to be fast, they were not very fast. Then we had to ride in the bed of a truck down a steep (shocking) bumpy road. There were four younger adults speaking Spanish (turns out they're from Spain) in the truck with us and on our tour. This was one that we definitely needed a guide for. They gave us dry bags and life jackets and showed us all around. It was BEAUTIFUL again. Seriously, it's like sensory overload with all the amazing things we were seeing.
This was a short little cave, if you can call it that. But I guess it counts because there were bats inside, lol.
This rock is covered in handprints in shades of red, orange and yellow. They use the rocks the make a chalk and dip their hands in it. Pretty fun!
And here is where the dry bags and life jackets come in. We had to swim to the waterfall and the current is pretty strong up by the waterfall. But it was SO PRETTY!
I know it looks like we were alone but we were not. There were lots of people coming and going. I loved the blue water, the canyon walls, the sunlight shining through...
After we swam out of the main area, we did some cliff jumping. These pics were taken from a video but I wanted them for memories. We jumped from this lower spot and then went higher and jumped again.
The guide took us off the path a little to see a bonus waterfall. And in the meantime we met this monster of a spider. It was massive. Ryan put his hand up close to it for reference but I was afraid he would scare it into the water and we were in the water and I didn't want it swimming around with us! He didn't bother us.
After all that fun we needed food again before we got on the road. This area had McDonald's! I was laughing at the tree in the middle of the entrance to the parking lot. McDonald's was about the same but they had fancy mcflurry's I think with kitkat or something. They also had a bacon option on their big mac and I thought I ordered it but I did not get it. Oh well.
Down from the mountain it was definitely hotter! 96 degrees according to my watch. Swimming felt good! We headed to one more waterfall.
Look how awesome! Llanos Del Cortez is literally right off the highway. We had read reviews about people trying to wave you down and charge you a fee before you get to the actual window. This appears to be a common theme in Costa Rica (more on that later). But it was later in the day and we didn't have any problems. There were people selling their goods at the parking lot. We bought a couple things and I can still feel the intense heat. Ryan asked if they had any cold drinks, but no. Anyway, this waterfall was magnificent!
There was a little path to the top of it. I have a bad attitude about going to the top of waterfalls (what is the point, the good view is from the bottom) but I was also just tired after our adventures so far. But we wandered around and saw a couple cool things up top. There was a guy that was lurking around and seemed to be trying to play "tour guide" for people and we assumed he was hoping for money and we wanted nothing to do with him so that was part of my bad attitude too but he didn't bother us. Eventually we made the drive back home and it wasn't too bad!
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