Costa Rica, 2008: Hiking the Corcovado National Park

THE RANGER stood on the station porch, leaning on a door frame, watching us heave off our packs and wipe the thick sweat slime off our faces with a bandana. It doesn't matter how often you try to wipe it off, it returns in seconds.

"Water?" he offers, and we gesture no, we have plenty. The ranger frowns and asks, "banos? We have nice banos" and again we shake our heads and smile. "A shower?" He suggests, as if there must be something we want after a 14 mile hike up to this ranger station through the hot, humid Costa Rican jungle. But we continue to shake our heads. He watches us for awhile, fiddling with his heavy black moustache, as we rummage through our packs looking for the required paperwork, then he has a new idea, "Catarata?" he says. We tilt our heads like cartoon characters, unsure of the Spanish word. We repeat it's lovely sound without any comprehension at all, "Catarata?" Finally Michael figures out the ranger's gestures and he exclaims, "Waterfall!" and suddenly we've lost interest in our packs, in our paperwork, in pitching our tent in the late afternoon light, instead we drop it all and head down the indicated trail with a skip in our step.

"I'll bet he usually gets takers on the first three items," I said, "We're the only ones out here it seems that carry a water purifier. I don't know what we'd do without it."

"That was about the nastiest looking water I've ever drank, I would have rather gone thirsty, than drink that without purifying it."

The trail took a steep turn upward, becoming just ledges of packed clay, held up by the criss-crossing roots of jungle floor. We rounded the top of the hill and saw that a deep ravine cut under us, the trail clinging to the side among the thick trees. The sound of rushing water flooded up and the cool of the forest hit us. We picked our way down the slope to a tiny pebble bank, a wide deep pool and a small flowing fall. It was cold and refreshing, the water clear and sweet. We floated for a bit, suspending our tired muscles, letting the dirt and goo from ten hours of hiking smear off. "Ah!" I cried, "twenty four!"

"Twenty-four?!" Michael called out. And I reached down to my thigh, flicked a tiny spot the size and color of my very own freckles, a tick. My twenty fourth of the day.

OUR QUEST was simple; we wanted to hike all the trails in the Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica's most remote and wild spot. But everywhere we turned we got negative information about several of the park trails. People we talked to clicked their tongues and shook their heads at us, chiding us. One trail seems to have completely disappeared while another sparked alarm in everyone who talked about it. Some people told us the trail from Sirena to San Pedrillio was closed. Some said it was impossible to finish. Others noted dangerous river crossings, high tides, crocodiles, sharks, soft sand and drug bandits. We deemed this trail top priority to complete.

Though no one seemed to have done the trail anytime recently, we were getting some consistent messages that we took to heart. First, it became apparent that proper gauging of the tides to cross the three major rivers was crucial. Second, due to the blazing sun and very soft sand conditions, it was clear that walking at night would be preferable.

We started our trek from Carate, a southern town on the peninsula a few miles from the park entrance to the north. Armed with a strange hand drawn map, photocopied infinitely and handed out by park officials, we were unsure of distances, river placements and terrain. The trail curves for 13 miles between a painful, blazing, soft-sand beach walk to an enjoyable and cool forest trek full of animals and flowers. We past the station La Leona, a tiny outpost overlooking the pounding Pacific surf. By late afternoon we crossed the Rio Claro and began our final forest walk into the park's biggest station, Sirena where we pitched our tent in the big lawn carved out of towering jungle.

From Sirena the trail to Los Patos is flat for about 11 miles, then the trail winds upwards through thick forest for another three miles to the station. After our dip in the waterfall, the ranger came over to watch us setting up our tent. He shamelessly enjoyed watching us unfold our damp tent, our damp sleeping pads, our damp sheet, our damp laundry, which we hung from the tree over our tent site. I grabbed our scrunchable pillows and puffed them aloft. To this the ranger whistled and he indicated that we are somehow commendable for having such an important luxury. As if he approved greatly of our priorities. Cataratas, and now scrunchable pillows.

The ranger, though, is quite perplexed that we have opted to set up our tent inside the fenced camping section at the very far end of the field, away from the sink, the picnic table, the other campers. How come, he wants to know, we didn't put our bug mesh tent under the tarp? I gesture to the sky and tell him I like to watch the stars. This does not solve the issue in his mind so I add that I prefer to be far away from others but he is still unconvinced. Then Michael pitches in to tell him we didn't know we were allowed to camp there and he wanders away, finally satisfied.

We woke to a horse standing next to the tent, snoring. It was a deep snuffing sound, a disturbing and mesmerizing noise. We could see the dark body of the horse through the bug mesh under a stary sky. "Look, I said softly to Michael, "the gate was left open, so the horse wandered in." Michael groaned. "Hey," I continued, "I've been thinking, what if the ticks we keep getting are coming out of my pack. Like I walked through a nest and they're crawling all over it?"

"Shit," he replied. "The pack could be infested and we have Snory-D-Horse out there. Try to scare the horse away, at least."

"This is an intimate experience with Snory-D-Horse and Ticky-la-Pack that I'd rather not be having." I said and I tried to focus on the sky, a billion pin points of light hovering over me, a perfectly black-indigo backdrop, a ring of jungle, sleeping under the glow. Then a grunt, like a giant fart, from a snoring horse.

THE MACAWS bark in the canopy, like bullies of the neighborhood driving their hotrods through stop signs and screeching their tires. They call out to their pals, maybe inviting them to the party. It's a noisy morning at five in the jungle of Corcovado National Park. There's a constant drone of bugs, a hum you eventually will call silence, when, finally, the birds take their afternoon naps. But for now there's no place more alive than here - packs of parrots chatter, toucans, macaws, pavas call out to each other; it's chaos. Then in the distance we hear a low moan. The forest sounds spooky. The clean wetness of the morning dew and the slanted light which had made it fresh and lovely just moments ago, feel clammy now - the smell of decay is everywhere, a moist smell punctuated with a heady pollen scent where blooms fall down to the trail from the canopy. The moan gets louder and louder and then the intoxicating, frightening sound falls away and becomes a hooting, a silly rambunctious hoot. The exact noise of a cartoon monkey. It is the call of a Howler Monkey, and he thinks it will scare the skin right off you. I laughed at him, peeking down from the trees and called out back to him, the same silly hoot, which made him extremely angry with me, so he resorted to snapping branches and bombing them down on me.

Eventually we moved down the trail, on to other noise making monkeys, more birds and bugs, peccary and agutis. "Listen, I said to Michael, "I think you can hear the howler giving his buddy a high five. He's scored again with his scary hooting act and managed to scare us off, again."

"That silly monkey," Michael replies, "He must be satisfied with himself."

Walking back to Sirena from Los Patos, our third day on the trail, we were fast and energized. We counted our miles to ourselves, adding them up in kilometers and then trying to calculate the conversion. We guessed at how many miles we added on to the trail distances when we took extra offshoots, tracked a pig herd or explored rivers. We guessed that once we made it back to Sirena we'd be at over forty miles.

At Sirena after dark we set off with our headlamps on to find tarantulas, frogs and nesting birds along the trails. In the tunnel of moonlit forest trail, following the eerie light of our halogen bulbs, we swept our beams over glaring red eyes at each turn. Huge spiders shimmered. Birds blinked in the glare, while crickets and dragonflies massed in clouds of twinkling red bulbs. In the brush we heard a snorting, a wet snuffing noise. We veered off trail and found a muddy creek and a bathing Tapir. He looked bored with us and he stuck his trunk into the water and slurped loudly. He slapped his trunk in the water and snorted bubbles. His big belly rubbed the mud under him as he oozed his way to another mud patch between puddles. After a nice long drink, the Tapir gently put his head on the bank, and still standing belly high in mud, he closed his eyes and sighed himself to sleep.

All night and into the morning the rain droned down on us in our tiny tent, a bubble of dry air in the middle of miles of wetness. We breakfasted on cold oatmeal and discussed our rations - low - our rain day activities - borrowing the rangers boat - and our electronic problems - one camera down. After a long wet day paddling the river, we surmised that though the crocodiles and the sharks are certainly present at the river, the crossing could be made safely at low tide. We checked the tide charts for the next day - the day of our big perilous trek to San Pedrillo - and determined that we could cross river number one at 3am - one hour before low tide - then move on to river number two about an hour after low tide. The third river was much farther north and we would have to figure out that crossing when we arrived since our hand drawn map featured suspect distances. We could always sit on the bank and wait.

AT 2:30 WE woke in darkness with overcast skies. We quickly broke down our tent, packed our wet laundry, and headed out to the beach and up to the river. A speck of light on the horizon glowed - the sun, still hours from rising. At the river it was dark, I couldn't see the other bank, but knew from our scouting trip that I had to stay close to the ocean to ensure I was in the shallowest lane. The mouth of the river was very wide and it gushed over the rocky beach. I followed Michael, my headlight beam catching in his wake.

Along the beach, in the darkness of night, we spotted tracks on the beach. Like tractor wheels, cutting up the sand, we realized they were fresh turtle tracks - three feet wide, the tracks led to a buried egg nest and looped back down and disappeared in the surf. This desolate stretch of beach where almost no hiker goes is the perfect place for a batch of little turtles.

As the sun rose and the animals awoke, the light seeped in around us. We were walking a stretch of beach that we'd been warned would be punishing. The sun beats down on you, the sand is soft and hard to manage and there's those pesky drug runners. Well, since it was early morning and low tide, we could walk on the hardest of available sands, down near the water line and avoid the soft sand and harsh sun.

In only and hour and a half, walking over three miles an hour, we reached the second river. It was barely light and it was just past low tide, so the water was low and the bottom nice and gravelly. We trudged through without a problem, stopping on the other side to dry our feet and have a snack. We felt like conquerors.

At seven thirty I gasped and pointed, "Look, I think it's a river up ahead!" We were only four and a half hours in to our trek and already we had reached the third river. We had worried that we would have to wait out high tide, but as we got to the bank we saw that though it was deep and the water was rushing up, we could make it by hugging the surf line. I went first, watching the ripples that marked shallower portions.

To my left the ocean surf broke in big whitewater waves, while the river water to my right forced itself against the current. The water surged around me, reaching the bottom of my pack mid-river - about twenty meters. I felt the slope of the bank rise under my feet and I called back to Michael, that I had made it through the deepest section. I trudged on the far bank, another twenty meters on.

JUST UP THE beach from the river an arched rock with a lone tree on it juts out from the beach, it is there that the San Pedrillio trail turns in and becomes a forest trek. Ahead we saw three men standing on the beach and decided to ask about the trailhead. We found a dilapidated sign, but the trail itself was completely overgrown and impossible to locate. As we approached the men, we noted that they were locals; then we saw their machine guns, slung casually over their shoulders. They were barefoot and had their ranger shirts unbuttoned. We asked them where the trail was and they motioned to us the same spot, so we lavished thanks on them and their giant guns and backed off. We stumbled through the jungle for some time, cracking through the branches and trudging through the leaf litter of the forest floor. Finally we fond the trail as it led straight up, over the beach cliff and into a deep quiet jungle. "Let's look for animals now," Michael said, slowing down and cocking his ear to the trees.

"No way! I exclaimed, "we're almost there and the animals are sleeping - listen to the quiet!" And I paused for effect to hear a harmony of bug humming. "See, quiet! Let's kick this trails ass!" I declared, my ego was all puffed up, I felt great, and I wanted to make record time to the station, even though I knew of no other time to beat. "Hey," I called out behind me, "Do you think that those guys with the guns were what we were told about - I mean the drug runners? Do you think that they were waiting for a shipment, you know, like they were the narco-stimpys we'd been warned about? Maybe that was dangerous, and we didn't even know it!"

"Nah, those narco-stimpys wouldn't be camping on the beach like those rangers were," Michael replied, "but maybe they were waiting for the narco-stimpys to arrive."

"Maybe they thought we were Narco-stimpys! I bet they saw us crossing the river and decided to get out their guns and watch us."

"Man, if I had known that they had those giant guns, I would have never walked up to them."

"Yeah, they must have thought we were real morons!"

AFTER A LONG quiet walk though giant primary rainforest, with massive hardwood trees towering over us, we began descending back towards the beach and in blinding sun we realized that we had made it to the network of trails surrounding the San Pedrillo station. There were hikers everywhere in huge groups led by guides with spotting scopes and field guides. They smelled nice and they carried an absurd amount of stuff. They seemed to be constantly rubbing their pasty skin with zinc or bug spray. They had video recorders, cameras, and binoculars in fanny packs. They wore floppy sun hats and vests with hundreds of tiny pockets. They seemed to think we were as interesting with our giant packs and muddy legs as the animals they were stalking.

The station came up in the distance while a Coati rummaged the beach driftwood for crabs. He sat on his haunches and gobbled up each little thing he drug out of the sand. He pushed his nose, like a shovel, along the sand then dug in at will. The sun was now hot and beat down on us; in the shade of the station, hikers sat snaking and resting.

"So, do we keep going?" I asked, looking over at Michael.

"Yeah, I think it's 6 or so miles to town and we should see other hotels and things along the way. We can do that. I mean, it's only noon. Should we stay here and camp now and have nothing to do for the rest of the day, or walk a few more miles and have a hotel, a beer and a shower?"

"Definitely a few more miles for a nice cold beer."

"Alright, so lets keep going, we'll be sitting at a bar at sunset,"

But we weren't. Not even close. The trail now hugged the coastline and with it being high tide, there was only soft sand to walk in. The twisting burned inside my ankles and ground in the sand that shimmied down into my sock.

Our feet had gotten wet when a small creek bank we were standing on collapsed. We no longer had dry shoes and since nothing dried in the sweltering humidity, we had run out of dry socks too. I could feel the blisters growing on my feet. Each little flex of each foot sent electric hot pains through my feet. Michael looked back at me as I pitifully winced, "they're just feet," he said, "They'll heal."

I kept telling myself that as I walked trying to forget the pain. Hours past and my walking slowed. The trail wound up and down, over and over again, torturously. Michael, to my distain, became more cheerful and to keep me going, he started talking about it being a real achievement, and a real adventure. But I kept thinking about the fact that we'd been walking for 13 hours and we had expected a road, hotels, cars, bars, cold beers, now that we were out of the National Park, but there was nothing at all except more trail, difficult passes and bigger blisters. I knew we'd made a mistake to keep going, since this would have been a beautiful and fun hike if only we hadn't been so tired, if only our feet weren't so wet.

Darkness was creeping in and we were forced to pull out our headlamps. Every hour that passed we were sure that we had made it. "It's just around that point, up ahead!" Michael would call out, but behind the point would be more darkness. We saw a cluster of people on the beach and our spirits were buoyed. In the twilight we saw dogs playing in the surf and picnics being packed up. Tents at an eco lodge popped up and we knew we had to be within the fabled two mile stretch where town and civilization come to this wild peninsula, where we should be able to find a road and a semblance of a village. We stopped to study the map. We made the same guess as we'd been making for the last five hours, "it's got to be about two more miles, no more," Michael said for the zillionth time. Just then a dog came up, a black lab mix with a white-tipped tail. We gave him a pat and said hello and walked on. But the dog wagged his tail and followed us, we named him Trailer.

In town, long past dark, the one little store, two restaurants and one hotel were open. A church service was going on and a dozen people sang together in the glow of the chapel. Trailer walked up to the hotel with us and settled on the porch while we showered and examined our feet.

My feet were pure white, wrinkly from wetness with swollen bags of loose skin in key areas. "look, it's elephant toe," I pointed to my little toe which looked like it had elephantitis - blisters sitting on top of even bigger blisters, all deformed and white. Michael peeled off a couple toenails and taped them up. We estimated that we'd traveled over 26 miles and gathered more blisters in one day than ever before. A personal best.

We walked, with Trailer behind us, to the restaurant at the end of the road, the Jade Mar. It was packed with people and dogs, eating, drinking and watching television on a huge flat screen TV. We ordered pizza and a six pack of beers.

AFTER A LONG deep sleep, we woke up to a warm morning and crowing roosters. I dangled a hand over the side of the bed and grabbed the pizza box and bag of leftover beers. I woke up Michael and with a smile I handed him a warm beer and a cold greasy slice.

We pulled our gear together and got outside to eight am sunshine. From across the street the dog, Trailer, hopped up. He'd stayed on the porch all night and was waiting for us in the shade of the mini market. He took a seat next to us as we studied our map, "Everything on here is two miles apart, regardless of what it looks like, so let's just say it's another two miles."

"But, it's really only, like, a mile," I said.

"Don't you worry, missy," He replied, "It'll be two miles."

You'd think that after logging about 75 miles over the last five days we'd be able to navigate our way just one more mile without any problems, but with Trailer in tow, we decided to continue on the trail and we managed to take a half mile wrong turn and had to double back. "There," Michael said, "Now it'll be two miles."

Instead of the trail, this time we opted for the road, an inland muddy track that ends there in Aguajitas. We walked up it, to the beginning of the peninsula, the end of our trek, to our reward, the Pirate's Cove hotel, where we'd sit in the sun, get eaten alive by sand fleas and drink beer for two days, recalling our tales of the National Forest to any other guest willing to listen.

I'm in a hammock, drinking my second beer, Trailer is lying on the porch under me, and we're watching eight big iguanas in the tree in front of us. Michael is fishing at the river mouth. We're in paradise.