(Not quite off) The beaten path
Back in Costa Rica - the land of pura vida and scarlet macaws, gallo pinto (ubiquitous rice and beans) and roadside gutters that can bury you vertically. It’s a place of lush rain forest and well-preserved wilderness, active volcanoes and nesting sea turtles. And the purest expression of its natural power can be found on the Osa Peninsula.
The muscular arm of it bulges out on the south-western coast. It is remote, with few roads and few people. Just getting here is a challenge, one not necessarily alleviated with a car — most 4x4s can’t even be trusted to make the journey. It is home to half the country’s species and pristine wilderness, protected by Corcovado National Park. It’s wild.
After a couple of days figuring out what would become of our car, and a couple more accepting its fate (it would remain in customs lock-up for another month), we decided to brave the journey in newfangled style — just our backpacks and some food essentials. The long and the short of getting there: Uber, train, taxi, bus, walk, bus, taxi, taxi, hitchhike, hitchhike, ferry. Two days and just 119 miles. Yeah, a mission.
But when we pulled into the bay at Playa San Josesito, waiting for a surge in the tide before unceremoniously hauling ass-and-all off the boat, we had landed in a verdant cove with leaning palms and black sand; surprisingly, there were other people, with cooler boxes. And after a fifteen-minute walk around the corner to our hostel, Life for Life Tourtle Hostel (sic), we discovered a Dutch tour group that occupied nearly every other available bed in the place. So this wasn’t quite the “veritable lost-world” the Lonely Planet describes.
All that to say, we weren’t breaking new ground, off the proverbial beaten path (in the same way we are not the only thirty-something couple in a van overlanding through the Americas, writing a blog). But our experience wasn’t necessarily diminished by this reality; en route to the hostel we had already seen scarlet macaws, crocodiles, coatis and white faced capuchins. Even in a hard-to-get-to yet far-more-inhabited wilderness, humans had not yet wrought their ways on the land, clearing and claiming it for their own devices. You still the sense that the jungle had the upper hand here, and at any moment might decide to gird up, quash any of the man-made efforts at staving it off, and simply swallow you whole.
Kayaking Rio Claro was the definite highlight. We set off early one gray morning, paddling up river from the sea. We were dwarfed by pendulous vines and a canopy that nearly knit together above our heads from trees flanking either side of the river. It was filled with birdlife, including the elusive black-mandibled toucan, which we heard but never saw. It was just us and our guide, Victor. We paddled until we could no longer make it over the rocky rapids, then tied our kayaks to the river's edge and waded upstream, skating over mossy rocks while clinging to tangled logs and debris, discovering pools and waterfalls along the way, then floating back.
On our second day we’d booked a trip further south around the peninsula to Sirena, one of the entrances to Corcovado National Park. Not much for organized outings, this was nonetheless the most prudent way to get into the actual park. Even with the $90 per person price tag it was the more conservative option — a day in the park with a mandatory guide will set you back $200, just for the guide’s fee. That morning, a taxi boat full of tourists arrived to meet us at the beach. It was windy and the sea was roiling. The French family at the bow already looked rattled. We ramped the incoming waves and charged out to sea. The hour and a half sail around the peninsula traced the coastline of sheer cliff faces, lonely waterfalls and beaches that wholly appear and disappear with the tides. We bisected the monstrous off shore rock formations, watching the ocean hurl wave after wave onto their jagged surfaces. It was beautiful and unhinging. The French family had repurposed their sandwich bags.
We arrived at the entrance -- a nondescript stretch beach littered with washed-up logs -- and quickly disembarked. As we sat next to a stream to lace up our hiking boots, a quick succession of boats arrived, disgorging passengers like hapless jungle fodder. They'd wade into shore one after another, juggling shoes and sacked lunches in hand, while jealously guarding their camera equipment slung across their torsos. Again, not the road less traveled by.
Our guide, Gravy, took charge. He quickly wrangled us and a German family and led us down a path in search of a sloth. Evidently Gravy had been here earlier because he lead us right to it (how much earlier, hard to say — sloths move pretty slowly, and sleep about fifteen hours a day). We glimpsed it through the telescope. Next, the howler monkeys. The tour groups were trickling in from every which way. This was a lush forest (though evidently not primary forest), alive with insects and birds and beautiful though not remarkably dissimilar to the jungle surrounding our hostel. Gravy had much to share with us, too, but it soon became clear that he was gunning from one major attraction to the next. Next, the tapir (sleeping in the swampy mangroves), then the caiman (no luck). And in no time it was back to the beach for departure — the sea was looking stormy, time to get moving. We had probably only wound our way around on a few kilometers of well-trod path. This was not a full-day outing we were promised. But what could we say? I just wanted to get home before the dark cloud in the distance loomed any closer.
I was relieved when my feet touched the familiar beach in the cove near our hostel. The waves at sea had been vicious as our unremarkable boat climbed and dove from crest to crest. We drank a few life-affirming coconuts and had a swim; both activities costing us nil. The next day we slept in until the downpour subsided, ate our customary breakfast of gallo pinto and fried plantains, read our books, then set off for a late-morning hike through the jungle. The path traced the coastline south on a trail that bypassed some of those lonely waterfalls and forgotten beaches we’d seen from the boat the day before.
