Writings By Location| None More Wet: Four Days at Corcovado | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
OSA PENINSULA, COSTA RICA — Much of our journey revolves around the development of this web site. During down time, we'll unload the digital camera onto the laptop, hook up to a phone line, and bring everyone up to speed on where we've been. Rainy days are great for this, fortunately.
So what do you do when you're faced with nothing but rainy days, but no electricity or phone lines?
This was the question Erin and I, along with her friend Kim, were faced with at the Corcovado Adventures Tent Camp, just a few miles north of Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica. We were ready for four days of swimming, snorkeling, bird watching, and wildlife pictures...we were not expecting to spend a week reeking of mildew. But that's not to say we didn't make the best of our situation, even if it did give us enough rainforest to last us the next four months.
We've taken many modes of transportation before, but probably never as many in one day as today.
Our first leg was a flight from San Jose to Palmar Sur on Sensa, the national airline. The Sensa terminal is a solitary, square concrete building, distanced from the main terminals, that looks as though it may have once been a large lavatory. It doesn't install one with much confidence to see the national airline's terminal being so run down, but there was no way we were going to suffer 6 hours on a bus to get there.
As we've seen other times when flying these little puddle jumpers, we left about half an hour early: once everyone was accounted for, the pilots seemed just as happy to get the whole thing over with so they could go home sooner. It was a 40-minute ride to Palmar Sur, and not the smoothest of rides. However, we sat in the first row of our 15-seater plane, which gave us a prime view of the Doppler radar. Knowing the plane had some form of equipment certainly made things look less grim, although at no point did I ever see the pilot or copilot actually look at it. More troublesome than the turbulence, though, was the fact that the pilots had trouble finding the runway when we got there because of the clouds. Airports that consist of a single gravel strip and a concrete bunker don't exactly have air traffic control towers.
