"the most biologically intense place on Earth" : Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica

Let me preface these two emails by saying my boyfriend has just completed a trek around the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica (quote in title from National Geographic) and I received the second email this morning.  If you are thinking of visiting the CNP, good luck!!!  I hope you enjoy reading this!


-----




I decided to spur into action and leave Uvita.


It happened like this. I borrowed a lonely planet from an annoying gap year child from Britain and set about deciding what the feck I am going to do with the rest of my time in Costa Rica. Now, I am personally of the opinion that you can't come to Costa Rica and not spend a good long time in the jungle, with machetes and snakes and pumas and the like; so I set about trying to find the best, most pristine, virgin rainforest to go adventure through. Turns out that is down in a national park called Corcovado, on the Osa peninsula, in the southwest of the country.


Seriously, check this out and see what you are missing.  National Geographic has called it "the most biologically intense place on Earth" .. It is widely considered the crown jewel in the extensive system of national parks and biological reserves spread across the country'. Fuck yeah. So, with a decision made, I sprung into action.


Before I continue my story: 'Corcovado is also one of the final strongholds of the Jaguar within Central America and several other felines are also present, including Ocelot, Margay, Jaguarundi, and Puma. All four Costa Rican monkey species can be seen within the park, including the endangered Central American Squirrel Monkey, White-faced Capuchin, Mantled Howler, and Geoffroy's Spider Monkey. Other mammals present include Two-toed and Three-toed Sloth, Northern Tamandua and Silky Anteater. Poison dart frogs and several species of snake (including the venomous Fer-de-Lance and Bushmaster) are also common within the park.' Mua ha ha.


Anyway. This place is seriously dangerous. People die here every year, so you basically need a guide. I went on google and wrote down the phone number of every company I could find that mentioned it, and set about rining them from the hostel in Uvita. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about the third-world-lack-of-organisation effect, which renders it impossible to organise anything remotely. In the end I only managed to get an answer on the phone from two companies, who wanted $1100 and $900 respectively for 5 days of hiking! Fuck that.


So I decided at about 1000 this morning to roll the dice and head down to the nearest town to Corcovado, which is a tiny place called Puerto Jimenez. I figured that I would be able to find a guide or something once I was here, if only by asking around in hostels and bars and such. However, the bus down here leaves at 1100, and so I had a mad hour running around packing my bags, saying goodbye to people, checking out, and the like.


I had a nice stroke of luck. I got off the bus at a place called Chacarita, to change for the bus down to Jimenez. Off the bus came another fellow, maybe in his fourties, the outdoor rugged type, and I struck up a conversation. He didn't speak a word of English, but I'm getting better at blabbing in Spanish and we managed to talk the whole way down here. Turns out he is a park ranger, been working there for decades. You should have met him, kitten; he was full of crazy stories of carrying people's corpses out of the park and people dying of snake bites and people getting stuck between two rivers in flood and all sorts of other adventurous mishaps. He knew exactly the guy to call, and when we got to Jimenez a tico guide called Felix met us there.


So I just spent the last two hours with Felix negotiating rates and making plans. He only charges $50/day, which is a bargain as near as I can work out (certainly compared to the nutcase prices suggested by the companies on the phone .. exploiting lazy Americans, I guess). He speaks good English, has been doing it for years, and appears to know his stuff. He showed me his three scars from where he has been bitten by snakes. I think he saw the gleam in my eyes as he spoke of the dangers, because he agreed to take me for a fairly serious expedition and not just dipping my toes in the water. We are going for five days, staying in the jungle the whole time, carrying our food and that, and hiking about 30km/day with full packs. We leave Sunday afternoon and get back next week. So if you don't get any emails from me, don't worry; I'll write a big long one with all my death-defying escapades upon my return :-)


So that is my news. At the moment I am in an internet cafe and there are two Americans who are under the impression that if you speak slowly and loudly, it automatically confers the ability to understand you upon whatever native you wish. The poor girl who works here visibly doesn't have a word of English, but that isn't stopping our intrepid customers.




----




So I'm back! With some stories to tell :-)


Bags packed and hearts set on adventure, we left on the Sunday around noon. In the final group was myself, Felix (the guide), his girlfriend (to do the cooking), and a German couple. We were supposed to drive for about an hour to a lodge a few kilometres outside the park, do some hiking around there, and then set off early the next morning to bisect the park.


The adventure started a little earlier than planned when our jeep got stuck after half an hour's drive on a very steep slope. Try as he might, our driver couldn't get the car to grip on the pathetic excuse for a road. Well, fuck it, I was there to hike; it didn't bother me so much. So we ended up hiking the last ten kilometres on foot. In a way, I was glad, because the terrain we hiked through was quite open, and we got a better display of birds than is found in most aviaries: tucans, scarlet macaws, the Amazonian green parrot, and other birds whose names I have forgotten but whose plumage was spectacular.


We started the next morning at a place called La Tarde, intending to hike first to a ranger station inside the park called Los Patos, before continuing on to cross the whole park to the main ranger station at Sirena. Felix and I decided to take this way in because it is the most difficult way in, and I like a good hike. The terrain is extremely muddy, making every step an effort to lift your feet from the soft ground. Most of the trail was ankle-deep in mud, with significant portions of it knee-deep. At times the trail was blocked by logs larger than a man, requiring us to climb over them or cut through the jungle to find a way through. The topography is very hilly, with lots of climbing up and down; when combined with the mud, it makes for a very slippery and difficult trek.  It is also necessary to ford approximately thirty creeks; most of them are just ankle-deep, but some of them were up to the knee.  To make it worse, this all happens in the brutal tropical heat and humidity, and remember that this hike would be with full pack (including all the food we would need for the entire time). It was't incredibly long -- 26km -- but long enough, considering the above difficulties.


Before he agreed to take me, he looked me in the eyes and asked me if I was ready for it, and I said yes. He also asked the Germans, and they said yes, but in their case it was not true. I cannot readily apprehend the kind of confusion that would lead one to think that a monthly unburdened three-hour stroll through the cool temperate forests of Germany would prepare you for a hardcore expedition through the jungle. They weren't ready, physically or mentally. I have a healthy respect for things that can kill me, like poisonous snakes and frogs, but their fear bordered on terror. As soon as the trail became a little muddy, they started walking like grandmothers, taking every step as through with a zimmerframe; by the time we reached the first ranger station at Los Patos, 7km in, we were already an hour and a half behind. Felix was very patient, letting them take frequent breaks, and letting them set the pace, even though we only had so much daylight. A few kilometres after Los Patos, it was obvious that Dominik, the German male, was just not up to it. We were covered with a sheen of sweat, but it was flowing off of him like a river; his face was ashen gray, and his stride was weak. Felix asked him and I if we wanted to go on; I was dead set on continuing, and said I wanted to continue on, and if he wanted to quit he could walk back a few kilometres to Los Patos and stay there. He decided to stay (which turned out to be an awful mistake, as you will soon find out).


A few kilometres later -- 13km in, 14km to go, quite literally the middle of nowhere -- things came to a head. The two Germans broke down,saying that they couldn't go on any more, although quite what they proposed to do instead of walk I amn't quite sure. Felix was trying to assure them, and said that it didn't matter at what time we arrived at Sirena; we could arrive at sundown (6 pm), or 7, or 8, or whatever. That we were going to arrive after dark was obvious from our hindered pace, but this hadn't really sunk in with the Germans. At this point Dominik panicked. 


Dominik: "Excuse me, but I am not valking anyvere in ze dark! I am not going anyvere! Zere are snakes!" Oh dear, I thought. What is he going to do instead?  Stand still like a statue for the 11 hours of darkness?


Dominik: "Vell, can't a car come and pick us up?" At this point he was delusional. The trail was often knee-deep in mud, and regularly barricaded with logs. There is no vehicle ever built that could pass the trail, and this was entirely obvious to anyone with a brain.


At this point, Felix became furious; to be honest, I can't blame him, because they were rather infuriating. The reason we were to arrive after dark, he explained, was because of their snaillike manner of walking. He had budgeted plenty of time to do the hike in the daylight (we left at first light, anyway), but he couldn't help if they had said they were fit enough and they actually weren't.  If he wanted to avoid arriving after dark, then Felix would set the pace, and they would just have to keep up. Evidently their fear of snakes was more powerful than their previous collapse, and we set out.


The next four hours are best described as a forced march, more appropriate to boot camp than to a holiday. Felix and I set a hard pace, to make up for the time we had lost with their timewasting. We put our heads down and got on with it, forgetting all pretense at watching the wildlife. A jaguar could have walked past us, and we wouldn't have noticed. Even I found it very tough, and I am a regular walker. Dominik was sweating so much that he had drank eight or nine litres, and it still wasn't enough. I ended up giving him half of my water, which meant that I was rationing myself for this very difficult hike, and with two hours to go I had greedily sucked on the last plastic-tasting dregs from my camelbak. About four or five kilometres from Sirena, it finally became too much, and he physically collapsed. Felix and I talked about it (we were lucky that we could speak Spanish fairly well, while they understood none of it, so we could talk the truth without them hearing it) and we decided the only way out was to go on.


So we divided his kit between us, half and half. He had brought an incredible quantity of the most useless rubbish. Snorkel gear? You can't even swim in the park; there are crocodiles on the beaches. A pillow? Books? A laptop? Fuck sake. His pack weighed about 20kg, which surely didn't help his poor physical condition. Before adding his stuff, mine weighted about 10kg, and so by the time I took his rubbish I had doubled the weight I was carrying (this on top of giving away my water). We half-dragged, half-stumbled him the last few kilometres. By the time we got to Sirena he was delirious and semi-conscious, babbling and barely aware of what was going on around him. Those last few kilometres were an utter hell that seemed to last forever. I can't really describe it in words. There were few sights more welcome than the headtorches of Sirena when we arrived after dark. I was never happier to see a tap in my life, and filled my belly with water while Felix brought the German fool to the medic at the station.


So that was the hike from Los Patos. At this point, an aside is warranted. At Sirena, I found that quite a strict hierarchy of respect was in place among the people staying there, depending on how you had come there. Lowest in the pecking order were those who arrived by boat from Drake Bay. Typically just day-trippers who were spending an incredible amount of money to stay in an "eco-lodge", they were looked down on by ranger and hiker both as dilettantes and pretenders. Frankly, anyone who would come to a jungle wearing flip-flops deserves a bit of scorn. Medium in respect was the usual way most people came, by hiking from Carate via La Leona along the southern coast of the Osa peninsula; this was the way I left, and varies from fairly easy to brutal depending on the weather conditions prevalent. For the past few days the weather had been easy, and so it didn't garner any war stories or street cred.  The highest available way was the way we came, from Los Patos, and when people learned the way we had come they all wanted to hear how it was.  Many talked about doing it, but funnily enough most found an excuse not to, usually involving blisters or knees or what have you. There used to be a way that is harder than Los Patos, which was the hike from San Pedrillo; however, the rangers had closed it permanently because too many people were dying en route. This was the way down the west coast of the peninsula, where many rivers drain to the sea; to hike it, you have to time your hike very carefully so that the rivers are fordable with the tides, and stick religiously to the pace. Even if you did that, you still weren't guaranteed success, for a freak storm (common, and completely unpredictable, in the rainforest) could mean the rivers were uncrossable even at low tide. Many people found themselves between two unfordable rivers, and they were unprepared for staying out in the jungle overnight, for they were packing as light as possible. This led them to try crossing the rivers anyway, which ended up with them being swept out to sea. So you can't walk that way anymore.


We spent the next two days hiking around the ranger station at Sirena. When I say we, it was mostly myself and Felix, for the German was utterly bedridden with exhaustion. His partner sometimes came, and sometimes stayed to look after him. I was happy with that, because it meant we could hike as much as I liked, and we could see more with less people making noise and scaring away the animals. I had come through the hike from Los Patos relatively unscathed, and the hikes around Sirena were without pack, and so I enjoyed them greatly. Sirena has an incredible concentration of wildlife, apparently because it has an incredible concentration of fruit and nut trees that the wildlife like to eat. We saw an amazing variety of tropical wildlife, mostly because Felix had eyes like a hawk. Before I list what we saw, I will recount one event. We were sitting down in Sirena, eating; Felix had his back to the kitchen (which is raised off the ground). And yet somehow he spotted a fer-de-lance snake (deadly poisonous, with thousands of deaths a year) gulping down a lizard, in the dark space under the kitchen! I still don't know how he saw it. Anyway, I saw, in no particular order: all four species of monkey in the park (spider, squirrel, white-face, and howler; Felix greatly enjoyed making the noise the howler monkeys make, which pissed them off endlessly as they started screaming to defend their turf and harem), crocodiles, bullsharks, two chameleons (I have no idea how he spotted them while we were walking, for I had to look for several minutes to see them while he was pointing at them), iguanas, snakes (both deadly, the fer-de-lance and a boa constrictor), a sloth, an anteater, peccaries (a kind of tropical pig; the main food for pumas and jaguars), bush turkeys and chickens, agoutis (a kind of tropical rabbit), coatis (a kind of large tropical raccoon), and all different kinds of birds: tucans, scarlet macaws, lots of different (and spectacular) parrots, black haws, vultures, and many more whose names I can't remember ..


The monkeys are incredibly beautiful to watch. They are not afraid of much except pumas, and make little effort to hide themselves; once you know what to look for, they are fairly easy to spot. Such agility and grace, as they leap from branch to branch; they look so free.  The first time I saw them, I tried to get as close as possible to get the best view. What no one told me is that when monkeys feel threatened by you, one defence mechanism is that they start trying to piss on you to scare you off! Felix had deliberately not told me, as this is apparently part of your jungle initiation, and he was laughing so hard it hurt as I ran away from the streaming flow of monkey urine.  Fortunately it didn't hit me, and I stayed a healthy distance away from then on. He also decided that he liked me (I guess because I had toughed it out, when the others had collapsed) and decided that part of my initiation was to eat all sorts of random jungle stuff that he was to serve. The most interesting was when I ate about two hundred grams of termites. You have to crush them first, to make sure they are dead; otherwise they cause all sorts of trouble when you put them in your mouth. Once you do that, they are actually very tasty, with a vaguely minty flavour.


Sirena itself is primitive. The showers are cold, the mattresses are bare, and the mosquitos are ferocious; regardless, I loved every minute I spent there. One time, Felix, his girlfriend and myself were sitting down to enjoy dinner (for his girlfriend is a very good cook). She was idly playing, trying a piece of rope around his fingers. I said to them that, in English, "tying the knot" means getting married. He turned to her, looked her in the eyes, and said: "Will you marry me?". The poor girl doesn't speak English, and so hesitated for a second, before turning to me; I translated into Spanish for her. She smiled nervously, giggled a bit, and then said .. "Eh .. no.". Felix pushed her hand away and didn't say another word for about an hour, so I guess he was serious about it. Just me, him, and her. Definitely one of the more awkward moments of my life.


Anyway, the time came to leave. I had greatly enjoyed my time there, but we had run out of food, and that was that. By this stage the Germans had left via boat to Drake Bay, for they were in no state to walk anywhere.


While I was there, it was mostly dry, for which I was very grateful; however, the storm that had been building the whole time broke the night before I was to leave. I'm not joking when I say that no one in the station got a wink of sleep all night. The heat was incredible, and the drumming of the rain on the roof was louder than a Metallica concert: even shouting at the top of your lungs, you could hardly be heard. When the thunder came, it made the whole building vibrate for several seconds. It was intense.


It was still going strong when first light came and it was time for us to leave. I am not afraid of rain, and knew to accept whatever comes; but it made for a very difficult hike indeed. 


Firstly, to leave via La Leona you have to ford the Rio Claro, which is infested with crocodiles.  Normally it isn't too much of a problem, because you ford it at low tide. But because of the incredible volume of rain that had fallen overnight, the river was swollen and in flood, even at low tide.  However, we didn't have a choice, and so we hiked upstream to somewhere a bit more passive and waded in. It wasn't so bad, only up to my waist, and we didn't see any crocs along the way. 


Secondly, all the trails through the forest were rivulets, and we walked ankle-deep in water. That's not so bad; what is worse is that the walk involves long sections on the beach, which stretches for as far as the eye can see. With the sand being so wet, it sunk gloopily beneath my feet each time I stepped on it, and then sucked at my boot as I would lift my foot out again. It made for each step taking about three times as much energy as it normally would, utterly exhausting work. The fact that I could barely see with the amount of water dripping from my eyebrows didn't help morale, either. It was a long walk back to Carate, but we stuck with it and made it, tired but ecstatic. 


We had arranged for a lift from Carate back to Puerto Jimenez, a drive of about two and a half or three hours. But the taxi driver bailed on us, and so we were glumly considering the possibility of waiting four hours in the rain for what passes for public transport, which is a cattle truck. As luck would have it, there was a small jeep carrying a trailer full of rubbish back to Puerto Jimenez, and Felix knew the driver, so we hopped in the back. The smell didn't bother me, because we smelled very bad anyway. The drive back is crazy; even the cars have to ford rivers to pass through, and the road is so bad any European civil engineer would be ashamed to have his name associated with it.  Along the way we met one of Felix's friends, who was walking back, and hoping to meet someone he knew to give him a lift. He was hilarious, and we four spent the time in the back of the rubbish truck singing and dancing the whole way. I came back to Puerto Jimenez, paid Felix, got my stuff, and crashed.


Today I decided I wanted to see the Atlantic, so I rose at 0400 to get the bus to the other side of the country, to Cahuita. I spent fourteen hours in a bus today, and am even more tired than I was yesterday, but I wanted to write this email, and so stayed up to send it to you in time for the morning. As I left Osa I saw the Pacific, and when I saw the Atlantic for the first time in five months a song came to my mind:


(insert lyrics of song. Don't want to post it here, for privacy reasons)


Google will provide a translation, I'm sure. Not quite right -- the direction is off -- but it is close enough, for I will be home across the Atlantic before we know it!