Writings By Location| None More Wet: Four Days at Corcovado | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
Our search for blue skies on day two inspired us to try again, only a little further this time. With Fernando as our guide, the three of us, joined by Etta, took our boat and a picnic lunch to Corcovado National Park, just a few miles south along the coast.
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| Keith, Kim, and Etta at Parque Nacional Corcovado |
To our great fortune, the skies were blue and cloudless here, giving us a great opportunity to duck right back into the forest where that pesky sunlight wouldn't get to us. Of course, just getting to the forest was made a little more complicated by all the rain of the past days. Normally, a small river rests between the park entrance/beach and the forest; today, however, it was a gushing torrent. Fernando bravely made several attempts to find a shallow crossing point, with the best he could do being a path where the water came up to his chest (about the same for me). At this point, he was contemplating another, less interesting trail (after we dared him to steal a motorboat moored not far away, and he refused), but we insisted we were up for the "good" trail. So finally, Fernando had us put our day packs over our heads, commando-style, and wade across where the river and ocean met. The waves threatened to consume us, or at least wash us away, but our group effort paid off, and we made it across in one piece. Even Etta proved to be quite a trooper.
(We later found that everyone else had the park ranger, who just wasn't around at the time, take them across in that aforementioned boat. Our way was more fun, though.)
Walking through tons of mud collected throughout the week, we sacrificed our shoes for dozens of great wildlife sightings, including a keel-billed toucan, an aracari, agoutis (kind of like basselopes), a family of coatis on the beach (one of which chased down and started munching on a basilisk), and four more pairs of scarlet macaws. After returning to our lunch spot (made easier by the fact that the boat ranger was around, this time), we hiked out to a waterfall and passed by several Jesus Christ lizards (so named because they run on the water surface).
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| Waterhole Swimming |
On our fourth day, we made another attempt to dodge the rain by boating out to Isla del Cano for some snorkeling and hiking. This turned out to be a bust: the one time it wasn't raining in our camp, it was raining there, making the water cold, and visibility next to nothing. So we backtracked and headed south along the coast again, to San Josecito beach, where the sky was just as clear as the day before. From here, we hiked about half a mile north to Rio Claro (our original goal on the first day), then — because of all the rains and high tides — borrowed a canoe, and paddled upstream about 100 feet to a fifteen-foot rock face alongside a small waterfall. Scrambling over a few rocks, we ended up next to a big waterfall, and a little pool area. The water was virtually freezing, but there was no way we could resist jumping in and enjoying the exhilarating feeling of swimming right through a waterfall.
