Thursday evening I attended a celebration at the local elementary school with my Tico “parents,” their two married daughters, and the grandkids. They had the traditional runners come in to the assembly with a torch symbolizing the spread of freedom down Central America from Guatemala. The stationary torch took off more than anticipated and nearly caught the ceiling of the assembly room on fire, nice touch.
We proceeded outside as a fila or parade and circled the school in a large procession lit by faroles, personal lanterns made out of paper, cardboard, holding a candle. Remember these are elementary school kids holding these lanterns. I kept having visions of what kids in the States would do with such things. Somehow the whole thing went off without incident, no burns, and no fires.
Friday several of us students converged on the bus station downtown and took a bus to Jaco, the nearest beach. Jaco is by all definitions a party town. One has only to walk around town and without even asking offers abound for nearly every illegal substance known to mankind. A friend from school, Lance, and I found a place to stay after checking out the beach. Not the cleanest or most pristine beach by any means, dirty sand, gravelly in places. The waves are large enough to surf at times and the town is a surfers’ hangout.
Despite some rather noisy neighbors we slept fitfully and awoke early to an aguacerro or thundershower. We pushed back our planned early start, slept in, and took the 11 am bus up to Parque Nacional Carara. What would have been a half hour ride on the bus directo was an hour on the collectivo (self-explanatory, it stops everywhere to pick up anyone, a good thing if that’s what you need, a pain if it’s not).
The ranger was quite friendly and explained the various parts of the park to us, mostly in English. We chose an 8-9 kilometer hike along a river through more open jungle and declined the rubber boots available for rent after being assured that the fer-de-lance snakes (pit vipers, poisonous) were not normally found on trail.
I believe the most dangerous part of the hike was the 2 kilometers down the road to get to the trail. Driving in Costa Rica is one of those “cultural experiences.” Though I was taught in mission training that cultural differences are “not right or wrong, just different;” many would disagree when it comes to traffic. Nevertheless, we were soon tromping merrily down the trail, or should I say squishing our way. The puddles often engulfed the entire trail; streams ran across or down it. This was generally not a problem except I was a bit apprehensive in crossing large murky puddles, wondering what lurked beneath the surface.
Our first encounter with an animal was an agouti in the undergrowth. Part of the rodent family, they are about the size of a rabbit and apart from insects have an equivalent diet. Further down the trail something in a tree knocked twigs loose on us and we stopped to investigate. According to my wildlife book it is called a Tayra, a creature resembling an otter, part of the raccoon family, that climbs trees and is mostly carnivorous. It didn’t take to kindly to our presence, scampering about the tree and hissing at us. This was not conducive to a clear photo, hence the lack of one.No more encounters with animals until we reached the end of the road and started back. We dug out our pack covers and I my rain jacket as the rain came, right on the daily schedule for this time of year. Perhaps it was the rain that caused the monkeys to move about but halfway back we found them running about in the trees above us. The white-faced capuchin monkeys were great fun and we could have stood there for hours. They, along with the scarlet macaws we encountered a few moments later are members of the endangered species list.
Before this hike I must confess I wasn’t all that impressed with Costa Rica. They have jungles, yes; but so does Ecuador, beaches, the same. Mountains also, but Ecuador’s are larger. It is typical that a person in a new culture makes comparison to their primary culture, much to the chagrin of others, but I find myself making constant comparison to Ecuador. Anyway, this hike began the road to recovery, maybe I should say to appreciation. Here we were in a small, not so well known, national park; only one or two kilometers from the main road and it was like something from a National Geographic special. That’s cool.
Actually, the beginning of hope for this country living up to its reputation began for me the night before, talking with a muchacho at a tourism booth in Jaco. He described the Osa peninsula in southern Costa Rica and showed me an article in which National Geographic described this region as the most biologically intense place on the planet: over 400,000 acres with more biodiversity than anywhere else on earth. Yah, gotta go there.
So we made our way back to the ranger station, washed our feet off and caught the next bus after a five minute wait by the road; another collectivo but you can’t argue with the convenience. Well, except that we stood up almost the entire 2 ½ hours back. It’s all part of the adventure right? One that makes me look forward to exploring more. In the mean time there’s more Spanish to learn.
