To explain our experience of Corcovado, I really need to start with the heat. It is the sort of heat that leaves you dripping sweat 5 minutes after having a cold shower, when all you’ve done is lie down in bed. Combined with humidity that leaves the clothes you haven’t worn damp, the ones you have saturated. Sunscreen washes off in minutes as the sweat falls like rain down your face, and even drinking 4 liters of water in a day not a drop makes it to your bladder.
It was in this that we set off to hike almost 20km to Sirena station. It is a nearly 2 hour drive from Puerto Jimenez to Carate where the walk starts, so even with an early start we didn’t begin the hike until 7:30am. By that time the small drop in temperature that night time provided had disappeared and the mercury was already topping 35 degrees. As we started walking, much of it on soft sand along a mercilessly long beach which provided no shade from the pounding sun, we questioned what we were doing thinking we were up to this. But by this point we were committed, and there was no turning back. We were somewhat mollified when we caught up with the other group hiking the trail that day, a group of 20 something surfer dudes with tanned skin and ribbed abs all of whom seemed to have misplaced their shirts, to find they were also struggling just as much as we were. (We felt even better about ourselves on the way back, when we did the walk in two and a half hours less than them!)
We joined up with them and entered the forest together to search for puma, our guides convinced they would have more success together. Thomas, our guide, used his nose as much as his eyes and ears to search for animals. Often proclaiming he could smell anteater, peccaries, tapir or cat piss. Finger crossed we scanned the path, waiting as our guide disappeared into the undergrowth to see if there was something just out of sight. It was not long, maybe an hour, before we were rewarded by two puma resting only 20m from the path. We looked into their beautiful eyes, as they alternated staring at us and scanning the trees for prey. It was an amazing experience to be so close and on foot to such beautiful creatures. This was why we were sweating our way through the jungle. It was magical.
Our guide was an interesting person. He grew up on the border of the park and had started hunting illegally when he was 10 years old with his grandfather. By 12 he was hunting at night as well as during the day. In his words he would shot everything that moved, mainly for fun, but if something was edible he would eat it. He continued hunting and mining for gold (also illegal within the park) until he was 20 and his uncle convinced him to become a tour guide. He volunteered for a few months in the park, and a few more with some biologists, and has been a tour guide ever since. Occasionally this background would come out, for example we now know that Great Currasow tastes delicious. It also sounds more like a cow mooing than a bird, but I doubt that impacts the flavour.
In the way of guides everywhere what is exciting for them, is not necessarily that exciting for the tourists. We loved the monkeys and the coati, even though they were both common sights. For him though the most exciting thing we saw was a wasp. It landed on his leg and he was frantically trying to retrieve his phone to take a picture begging it to stay and not fly away. What followed was a long explanation of this wasp with it’s long tail and how it uses it to breed in figs. On another day we were together with another couple when the two guides started jumping for joy and giving each other hi-5s. They assured us that a blob high up in the tree was a porcupine, although even with binoculars we could only barely make out a rough shape and a possible head. The couple who were from Alaska, offered to send them a photo of a porcupine from their backyard, as the guides attempted to get an identifiable photo through a telescope.
Despite the heat, the sleeping arrangements (bits of foam under mosquito nets with everyone packed together on one raised wooden platform) and the ticks, it was definitely an experience worth having. I loved being woken at 3:30am by the sound of howler monkeys, and starting the first hike of the day marveling at the Milky Way visible in all it’s glory. I loved the the grin on our guides face when he returned from an explore of the undergrowth which meant he had found some animal or other. I loved sitting by the river chatting to new friends whilst spider monkeys played (and fought) in the trees around us. I loved coming across the unexpected such as a mother coati with two day old cubs who couldn’t even walk yet.
One of the surprises for us was the sound that howler monkeys make, because it doesn’t sound like a howl to me, more the noise a monster in a b-grade horror movie makes. They were even used for some of the dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park, and apparently other movies so we weren’t the only ones to picture monsters not monkeys when hearing them call. It’s also loud, the loudest land mammal with their call being audible up to 5km away.
Unfortunately our last day had a slightly unpleasant start. We woke up at 4am and packed our belongings ready for the 8 hour walk to Carate However, when it came time to put on our shoes Jason’s were missing. To cut a long story short they had been stolen by one of the construction workers and we did get them back; but it took 3 hours, some girl tears, and a refusal to just accept they were stolen given we were an 8 hour hike from anywhere, Jason needed the shoes to hike out and there were less than 10 suspects so it was perfectly reasonable to wake them up and search their belongings.
We ended up leaving at 7:20am, which meant the sun was already up and the temperature rising rapidly, and we now only had 6 hours to make it to the car. Yes, we made it. Yes, we were exhausted. Yes, we stank. As Jason said as he went for a shower - “I really do stink, I’ve found two ticks and they’re both dead!” I found this hysterical and spent ten minutes laughing so hard I couldn’t talk. It may have been partly due to the sleep deprivation, and general exhaustion.
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