Los Patos Ranger Station, Parque Nacional Corcovado, Costa Rica, 2004-05-16

In my rush and excitement to get to the river before high tide, I took off running in what was altogether despite what I could have easily figured out with a map the wrong direction. The wrong direction is a very hilly direction and my backpack was a very heavy backpack to be taking in the wrong direction. When I got to the end of the wrong direction and the staff at the hippy looking hotel told me I had to go all the way back down to find the right direction I was, well, really unhappy. Luckily I at least figured out that I could follow a river down to the right trail – which I now remembered was on the beach – and that saved me a little bit of backtracking. Also luckily I didn`t have to wait for the tide to subside to cross the next river because I arrived well after noon thanks to my genius little detour.

I did manage to get to Sirena before nightfall after about 7 hours of hiking on spectacularly pretty beaches. It does sound nice, but hiking on sand is quite difficult, trails are a lot easier I promise. Sirena was as beautiful as promised, set at one end of a grassy airstrip with the ocean at the other.

Last night, my second night at Sirena it sure did rain like crazy. During the night I was safe and dry, but I can`t make that claim about the 17km of trail today to get inland to Los Patos, many portions of which I would describe flatteringly as swampy and/or disparringly as small lakes. To be fair, so would I describe most of the forest. It was a little bit slow going at first, and then I saw a rather huge snake cross my path. With it`s head already under the roots of a tree there was still at least two meters left of its body. While it WAS moving rapidly away from me, it still scared the bujeezus outa me. A subsequent look on a laminated “Fauna of Costa Rica” sheet told me it was most like a Bushmaster or something like that. I figured that a snake so big didn`t need to be poisonous, but the sheet told me otherwise. At least it didn`t offer me any apples.

Mm… apples…

Canned tuna almost tastes like fresh apples if you close your eyes and squeeze your nose. Right?

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