MRPJ - MRAN
Puerto Jimenez, El Tanque
I’ll do a couple of stops to show you around my country.
We leave Puerto Jimenez and head north to La Fortuna. La Fortuna is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country, as it is the town next to the Arenal Volcano, a conical active volcano. Hordes of tourists used to go there for views of the lava and rock-spewing volcano and to enjoy the thermal waters.
El Tanque is a VFR-only airfield, and since this is a mountainous region, I’m curious to see how the approach will work out.
Right after takeoff, we are going to fly right over my mom’s house and make some noise over there. This is the town of La Palma where she lives.
On our way to La Fortuna, we need to cross the Cordillera Central, a mountain range which crosses through Costa Rica right through its middle and is home to a lot of volcanoes. The weather is perfect for VFR flying, so we will enjoy some nice views of the country which saw me come to this world first.
The Sierpe wetlands in the southwest of Costa Rica
San Jose in the background
Here you can see the Poas Volcano
As we approach the Arenal volcano, we can see Lake Arenal in the middle ground and 3 more volcanoes in the background.
Someone once crashed a plane while circling around the Arenal Volcano with tourists. So don’t try this in real life:
And finally we line up with the runway to land at El Tanque.
That’s it folks. A little bit of sightseeing across Costa Rica, but we need to continue our journey north. For the next leg, we’ll head over to Roatan, a diving paradise in the coast of Honduras.