This year, I got a brand new backpacking pack for my
birthday. What better place to break it
in than Corcovado National Park, labeled by National Geographic as “the most
biologically intense place on earth”?
Tim, Lauren, David and I decided to take advantage of Semana Santa (Easter week) to backpack
for three nights in this amazing place, and it was an unforgettable experience.
Getting there certainly wasn’t easy, because the park is
located in the Osa Peninsula, in the very south of Costa Rica. I left Pueblo Nuevo on Friday afternoon,
stopped at my San José home to pick up my backpack, and headed out to the bus
stop to catch our bus that left at 10:30 pm.
We drove through the night, and arrived in Golfito at 4 am, with three
hours to wait until we had to catch a water taxi to our setting off place,
Puerto Jiménez. Thankfully, Iveth (the
building manager at ACM) is from Puerto Jiménez and was heading home for the
holidays, so she was on the same bus as us and could show us around town and
introduce us to her family members. They
even tried to help find us a guide to take us around the park, but
unfortunately no one they knew was available.
We originally were planning on hiking without a guide, but
once we arrived in Puerto Jiménez in the morning and talked to some other
tourists and locals, nearly everyone highly recommended hiking with a guide in
order to fully enjoy the experience.
However, the cheapest price we could find for a guide would have cost us
$90 each for the three days…tough to swing on a college student’s budget. The colectivo
(truck transportation to the park) didn’t leave until the afternoon, so we
had plenty of time to debate. We bought
groceries, and at Iveth’s suggestion ate lunch at a town fair they were holding
to raise money for building a nursing home in town. Homemade tamales, salad and a natural fruit
juice for $2. Yum!
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| Homemade tamale |
It was a really tough decision, but in the end we decided not
to go with the guide. Unfortunately,
this meant we were without a cook stove (the rest of the gear, like tents,
mosquito nets and sleeping bags, were lent to us by ACM) and by that time all
of the places where we could have rented one were closed for lunch! We quick ran back to the grocery store and bought
some food that we could eat without cooking (hence the interesting meals you’ll
notice that we ate during the trip), then went to wait for the colectivo to take us to Carate, a tiny
town right near the entrance to the par.
After a three-hour long bumpy ride, we finally arrived. By
this time, it was about 4:30 pm, so we knew we should head off right away to
get to our campsite before dark. We
walked about 2 miles along the beach, in the gorgeous light of the setting sun,
and arrived at La Leona ranger station.
We set up camp and made peanut butter sandwiches with bananas for
dinner, and passed out around 7 pm – it had already been a looong day!
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| Beach hiking at dusk |
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| Driftwood on the beach |
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| The sunset from our campsite, which was right on the beach |
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| Heading off in the morning |
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| Anteater |
The hike to Sirena followed the beach, and the trail was
about half along the sandy shore and half in the forest. A couple of times it was difficult to find
the trail again after walking in the sand (high tide does a pretty good job of
erasing footprints), but we knew as long as we kept walking along the beach we
were heading in the right direction, and we always eventually found the forest
trail again.
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| The gorgeous beach we hiked along for several kilometers |
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| This was the entrance back into the forest after hiking along the beach; tricky to see! |
We didn’t see as many
animals while walking along the beach, but it was fun hiking because it involved
some exciting rock scrambling and because we were the only ones on the beach
for miles. That was definitely the only
time in Costa Rica I’ve had a beach to myself!
In fact, I think we only ran into three other groups of people in all
the seven hours we were hiking. One
group gave us a heads up that there was a pair of tapirs up ahead, which was so
cool to see! It was really amazing to
see the animals in this preserved wilderness area, because they were “tame,”
but not in the obnoxious way that the monkeys and raccoons in Manuel Antonio
were tame, begging and stealing food from people. Instead, the animals here were just
disinterested, as if they knew they had nothing to fear from humans. This allowed us to see wild animals very
close, which was incredible.
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| Tapirs! |
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| They were so close! |
We stopped for lunch on the beach (tortillas with peanut butter, granola and carrots was our lunch staple) and then only had about an hour left to hike. We crossed one final river, and then arrived at Sirena Biological Station. It was the weirdest thing after seven hours of hiking in the wild jungle to emerge into a mowed airstrip and find the biological station with electricity, running water, showers, and flush toilets! We were also very excited for the foam mattresses and covered sleeping platform, which meant we didn’t have to set up our tent and could just sleep under our mosquito nets and sheets – much more comfortable in the heat! After setting up camp, relaxing on the beach for awhile, and showering (such a luxury on a backpacking trip!) we made our “gourmet” dinner: canned tuna, crumbled up bread and refried beans all mixed together with some lime juice, cucumbers and carrots. It looked pretty disgusting, but didn’t taste that bad for a last-minute improvisation… at least it filled us up! And it was better than paying for meals at the station – those cost $25 each. We went to sleep at about 8 pm, absolutely exhausted.
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| Sirena Biological Station |
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| The "honeymoon suite" that Lauren and I shared |
The next morning, we choked down enjoyed the plain
oatmeal we had prepared the night before by soaking it in water… eating it with
peanut butter made it more palatable, and again, at least it filled us up! We had one more night at Sirena, so we were
able to spend this day leisurely exploring the trails around the station. On our morning hike, we saw many more monkeys,
a couple of “pavones de montaña” (Great Curassow), and lots of giant
spiders. We also met the crew of a BBC
documentary as they were leaving from two weeks of filming nocturnal animals
from Sirena Station. Apparently, the documentary
is called “Dark” and will be coming out soon, so check it out!
In the afternoon, we set off in search of a swimming hole
that a ranger had told us about. We had
some difficulty finding the path, and headed back to ask someone for
directions… Lauren and I were walking ahead of the boys, and all of a sudden we
smelled this incredible strong, pungent smell.
This sparked my memory of something I’d read in a guidebook, and I
realized it was the smell of peccaries (wild boars)! I looked over and there were two of them
right by the path! We were kind of
scared, because we’ve heard they can be aggressive and have been known to
charge people in herds, but there were only two and they ran away as soon as
they noticed us. Another animal sighting
to check off the list!
We never actually ended up making it to the swimming hole,
because the path was difficult to follow and covered with spiderwebs. We headed back instead to wash up and make
dinner: our tuna “casserole” again, with leftover oatmeal instead of bread this
time. It looked even less appetizing
than the first night, but really tasted surprisingly good… although everything
tastes good while you’re camping!
The next morning, we woke up early, packed up camp, ate our
cold oatmeal with peanut butter, and headed off back towards Carate – we had 20
kilometers to cover that day and had to be sure to catch the only colectivo back to Puerto Jiménez at 4:00
pm, so we needed to start early. We
ended up walking with some new friends we met at the ranger station: Johannes,
a German biology student studying at the Universidad Nacional here in Costa
Rica who’s been to Corcovado before and was very knowledgeable; his friend
Barbara who was visiting from Germany, and their tico friends. They were good
company, and we had a very pleasant hike back.
We laughed when we stopped for lunch and we (the Americans) brought out
our jar of peanut butter while they (the Europeans) got out their jar of
Nutella… how cliché. We traded tastes of
each other’s and that Nutella tasted soooo good.
Other highlights of the hike back were seeing a snake eating
a lizard – so cool! We stayed and
watched that for a while – and swimming in the Río Madrigal.
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| Snake eating a lizard! You can see the snake's mouth (it's orange and gray) biting down on the lizard's body (white-ish gray) |
We got back to Carate with plenty of time to spare before
the colectivo ride, and the ride
itself was actually really fun because our new friends started singing and we
joined in and sang together for a good chunk of the three hour trip. I’m now convinced that everyone in the world,
no matter what language they speak, knows the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
When we got back to Puerto Jiménez, the first thing on our
minds was food! The casado (typical Costa Rican meal of rice, beans, meat or fish,
salad, and plantains) I got at the little soda
(small restaurant) we stopped at tasted so
delicious. So did the ice cream stop
afterwards… mmmmm…
After dinner, we were picked up to go to our hostel, which
was really awesome, and we wished we could have stayed there longer! It was called Celvantes Jungle Lodge, and was
just opened three months ago by a couple of guys from San Francisco on 75
hectares in the jungle. The dorms were
in open-air cabins spaced around the property, and they had a really
comfortable communal space to hang out with a bar and shared kitchen.
The next day was a LOT of traveling, from 4:30 am to 7:30 pm
on several buses to get back to Pueblo Nuevo.
Lauren, Tim and I subsisted off of a loaf of bread, six bananas, a jar
of pineapple jam, and a sleeve of cookies.
Needless to say, I was very excited for some real food and a comfy bed
when I got back!
Animals we saw in Corcovado:
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Blue morpho butterflies
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Spider monkeys
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White-faced capuchins
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Scarlet macaws
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Squirrel monkeys (endangered!)
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Anteater
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Herons
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Great Curassow
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Tapirs (endangered!)
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Giant spiders with cool 3D webs
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Jesus Christ lizard
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Hundreds of hermit crabs
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Coatis
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Toucans
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Peccaries
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Unidentified snake eating a lizard
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Crocodile
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