The moment we arrived in Costa Rica was the moment we began hearing about Corcovado National Park. I mean, when National Geographic labels a place "the most biologically intense place on Earth"...you can prettttty much assume its going to be, well....intense. If only we had known just how intense...
On Saturday morning, we got a 5am wakeup knock from the totally endearing four foot seven inch Costa Rican woman whose house we were staying in right outside of the park. Bright eyed and cheery (read: totally suffering from lack of sleep), Jen and I hopped on to el collectivo, which is basically the bed of someone´s truck, covered with a tarp. After a two hour ride consisting of bumps, ditches, rivers, a cigarette break for the driver, and some more bumps...we finally got dropped off about a mile away from the park entrance and so the journey began... we walked along the most pristine strip of pacific coast line ive ever seen
for about one hour to reach the entrance station, and then from there they told us it would be about six hours of rain forest/beach hiking, and river crossings to get to the Sirena station where we had reservations to sleep. The ranger warned us in broken english to plan our trek around high tide, when apparently the bull sharks swim up into the rivers, and the chance of encountering crocodiles increases significantly. I´m sorry.....what?? Bull sharks? Crocodiles? Uhhh....Stopping a few times, it did end up taking us close to 7 hours to reach the station, but MAN did it feel good once we did! We took nice hot showers, put on the terrycloth bathrobes they provided, put our swollen feet up and watched a little Entourage that happened to be on HBO, and then ordered some room service...
And by that I mean we took freezing cold "showers" with our flip flops on, squirted some blackbean paste type thing into a can of tuna, put on some dirty damp clothes from our dirty damp backpacks, and laid down on our pee-smelling mattress-looking thing at the modest hour of 7 pm.
The next day we got up at 6, left at 7, and did the same trail for the way back, with one hour of rain which actually ended up being quite surreal. (Hiking in the rain in the rainforest...who would have thought?)
All in all...........coolest experience. ever?
ever.
1 comment:
Written by a true blogging vet. I want some description of the sounds you two were hearing underneath that thick canopy!
pictures - unreal.
....and the use of italics.
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