The centerpiece of the trip was to be Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula, which is located on the southern Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. Corcovado is considered the most remote and least visited of Costa Rica’s national parks, and is heralded for having been described by National Geographic Magazine as the planet’s most biologically diverse location, where monkeys and tapirs and crocodiles and snakes and poison frogs and sharks and jungle growth abound. The park presents the opportunity to backpack into its interior, and limits the number of overnight campers in the park at any given time. With this pedigree, Corcovado became the anchor point of our planning.
Built around Corcovado was a drive from the capitol city of San Jose down the southern Pacific Coast, the potential to stop at the Manuel Antonio National Park if we chose to do so, a stay at Drake Bay with a snorkeling trip to nearby Cano Island, and a visit to Boruca to see that village’s annual festival.
The trip would be made from December 24, 2009 through January 3, 2010. This is at the beginning of the peak season in Costa Rica. Given the straddling of Christmas and New Years, it is a peak within the peak. This is not what we consider ideal timing, as we prefer to distance ourselves from the tourist trade, but our schedules forced us to join the rush.
Because I live in Hawaii and Jen lives in San Francisco, we would have separate arrival and departure flights.
ARRIVAL
I arrived first, on a flight from Houston to San Jose. The Immigration and Customs processing for arriving flights is fast and efficient. It took only minutes.
Inside the airport, near the baggage carousels that sit between the Immigration and Customs checkpoints, there is a currency exchange booth where you can get the local currency, colones. Here is your first tip: Don’t exchange dollars for colones here. This place gives a sub-standard exchange rate, about 10% less than the going rate elsewhere. On top of that, every place we went took dollars, so you really do not need colones to get by. So, I would suggest bringing various denominations of US dollars with you, and then exchanging for colones at a proper bank when you get a chance, or just doing an ATM draw on your bank card in colones. Costa Rican banks and ATMs are not hard to find and, if your bank is like mine, you probably get the best exchange rate by using your card.
At the luggage carousels, you can get a luggage cart for no cost — one of those that you have to pay a couple of buck to use in the States. They are just sitting around the carousels, and are a big help moving your stuff through the Customs checkpoint.
Once you clear Customs, you are funneled to the only passenger exit from the building. There is a glass wall just outside the exit, and beyond that are people waiting for arriving passengers. Between the building exit and the glass wall are a throng of porters with luggage dollies, who tell you that the free carts cannot be taken any further, and aggressively offer to carry your luggage the remaining distance to your taxi or shuttle or car — for a tip, of course. This leads to another tip: Pick up your bags yourself, and carry them out. What you do not yet know is that it is only another twenty-five yards — just beyond the glass wall — that all the taxis and shuttles are waiting. So, if you let the porter take your bags, you will find that seconds later you are reaching into your wallet to tip him for a lot of nothing.
I rented a SUV from Thrifty, which is located a couple of kilometers from the airport. They have a shuttle that picked me up just outside the airport at curbside, and there was a Thrifty guy there who told me where to wait for it. Most other rental companies appeared to have booths in the airport, between the Customs checkpoint and the airport exit.
The vehicle I got was a Suzuki Jimny, with four-wheel-drive and a standard transmission. You need a four-wheel-drive vehicle in Costa Rica if you are going
to travel much of anywhere at all. There are many pot-holes, paved roadways transition to dirt roadways and back again on a frequent basis, stream crossings are a norm off the main highways, and daily rain makes for muddy travel. If we had not had a four-wheel-drive vehicle, we would not have made it to most of our destinations.
I had made the vehicle reservation through Expedia a few weeks in advance of the trip. Expedia offered complete vehicle insurance for on-line purchase, with BerkelyCare as the insurance provider. I bought it, thinking I was ever-so-clever for having avoided the crazy-high rates that rental companies charge. Wrong! Turns out that Thrifty does not accept the insurance offered through Expedia, which caused me to have to call Expedia from the Thrifty office and have the policy cancelled and the premium refunded. The Thrifty agent, who was a helpful guy, said that he ran into this all the time with incoming tourists. So, the next tip: Check with the rental company on the validity of any insurance coverage you are contemplating buying in advance.
Overall, the process for getting the SUV at Thrifty was as smooth and fast as just about any place I have dealt with in the States. As I’ll discuss later, things were a bit slower on the turn-in.
With SUV in hand, I drove to our first night’s accommodations. The room I had reserved was at the Hotel La Rosa de America, located about a twenty-minute drive west of the airport and the town of Alajuela. It was an easy drive, and the hotel was not difficult to find.
Overall, I liked this place. It is a convenient distance from the airport, but not so close that you are listening to jet noise and airport traffic. The rooms are nice and reasonably priced. The grounds are fenced and gated. There are three restaurants within easy strolling distance (although one is a buffet-style family restaurant that does quite a business with the locals, but doesn’t appeal to our anti-children-in-restaurants and anti-buffet viewpoints). There is also a new Banco Popular branch and a small convenience store within a few minutes’ walk. So, as a place from which to get collected on arrival day, it is about ideal.
The hotel is owned and operated by a Canadian couple, which gives the added bonus of gaining some local knowledge and advice without any language challenges. Again, ideal for getting your bearings on the first day.
Late that night, Jen arrived. I picked her up at the airport and drove her to the hotel. Unfortunately, all the restaurants were closed by then. I had, however, gotten some things for her to eat from a nearby restaurant, in advance of her arrival.
This leads to a word on Jen’s dietary considerations. She is vegan, meaning no animal products at all. No meat, no milk products, no honey, and so on. We became practiced during the trip in saying, “No carne, no queso, no leche, no huevos” — which translates as no meat, no cheese, no milk, no eggs. Some hotels and restaurants were very accommodating, others made only a token effort (just giving you fruit and toast while cutting out the eggs for breakfast is not being very accommodating; making up a vegan-friendly meal with rice, vegetables, and beans is being accommodating). Hotel La Rosa de America made no extra effort to accommodate Jen’s dietary requirements in the breakfast included with the room, despite being given notice in advance of our arrival. This is the one negative I found with the place.
ROADTRIP TO CORCOVADO
The next day, Christmas Day, we headed out on a two-day drive to the Osa Peninsula and Corcovado National Park. The first day’s route was Alajuela – Orotina – Tarcoles – Jaco – Parrita – Quepos, mostly along the coastal road. The final destination was Quepos, which is a town near the Manuel Antonio National Park.
Along the way, we stopped at a bridge over the Rio Tarcoles, near the town of Tarcoles, which is notable for the crocodiles that can be seen from the bridge. There were tour vans and cars parked near the bridge, with several people staring at the crocodiles from the narrow pedestrian paths on either side of the bridge. And yes, there were several crocodiles to be seen on the banks of the river.
Our guidebook indicated that car thefts were a problem at this location, and we had a load of clearly visible gear in the SUV. On the east end of the bridge, there were three police officers and a police car beside the remains of a run-down police building. I parked by them and exchanged greetings, figuring that was about as safe as things could get. We weren’t missing anything when we came back.
A bit farther down the road, we ran into a speed trap. I was definitely speeding, having been distracted by sweat 
dripping down Jen’s neck and into…well, you get the idea. The police officers signaled me to pull over. I provided them my passport, after which they politely waved me on. We had one other encounter with law enforcement later in our trip, at an agricultural checkpoint. In both cases, it seemed like we were given deference once we identified ourselves as US tourists.
We continued driving to our lodging for the night, the Blue Banyon Inn outside Quepos. This was the nicest lodging we had the entire trip — separate cabins of good construction and nice furnishings, beautiful grounds, and a great swimming pool. The owners are a Canadian couple who also operate a sanctuary near the grounds for marmoset monkeys from Brazil. They were hand-nursing a set of baby marmosets during our stay, and we had opportunity to see them. We were also able to go with the owners to feed their adult monkeys prior to leaving the following morning.
We certainly recommend the Blue Banyon Inn to anyone staying in the Quepos – Manuel Antonio area, but you will need your own four-wheel-drive vehicle. Getting to the inn requires driving along several kilometers of dirt tract, some of which is steep enough and potentially muddy enough to require four-wheel-drive; and dinner and lunch can only be had by driving into town.
As to Jen’s diet, the inn offered only the fruit and bread that would have been part of its breakfast, anyway — nothing tailored to her. And this leads to a general observation: The expatriate hoteliers offered the best accommodations, while the local hoteliers made the best efforts to accommodate dietary requirements. Our sampling was probably too small to expand this observation into a general planning consideration, but I thought it worth mentioning.
That night, we had dinner at a place called Ronny’s 
near Manuel Antonio. It’s down a dirt tract on the south side of the main highway, and was recommended by our hosts. The food was good, and we managed to work out a decent vegan dinner for Jen. The view of the sun setting on the ocean was superb. The only downside was that van-loads of tourists were brought to the restaurant as sunset approached, which detracted and distracted.
The next day, we drove to the Osa Peninsula by way of Highways 34, 2, and 245; through the towns of Dominical, Palmar Norte, Palmar Sur, Chacarita, Rincon, and La Palma. We stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant near the town of Mogos on the Osa Peninsula, which was very accommodating to vegan requirements (unfortunately I can’t recall the name of this place, but it’s the only real-looking restaurant in that area of Highway 245). We also stopped at a small grocery store in the middle of nowhere, near the town of Rincon, which we ended up visiting three times during our trip. It’s just one of those places that are right where you need them, when you need them.
That afternoon, we arrived at our lodging, the Danta Corcovado Lodge, which is located west of Puerto Jimenez and near the Los Patos entrance to Corcovado National Park. This would be the staging area for our three-day backpacking trip into the park. The plan was to leave our SUV and excess baggage at the lodge, and then return to the lodge the night we exited the park.
Danta Corcovado Lodge is a collection of cabin-type structures, connected by trails through a jungle-like setting, with a main office and dining structure as the centerpiece. The cabins are dispersed enough to offer a sense of privacy, and the two that we used were log framed with screen sides and roofs of a canvas-type material. Think of them as upscale, wood-framed tents with rustic but well-done bathrooms (although the toilets have these uncomfortable wooden seats made in the shape of the lodge’s logo). The cabins had porches with hammocks, and inside there were curtains that could be closed for privacy. The one downside was the absolute lack of warm water. Despite the hot weather, cold showers still sucked.
Water temperature and pressure is a general problem we encountered throughout our trip, save for the Blue Banyon Inn. Sometimes there was no hot water at all; and where there was, it usually fluctuated between lukewarm and scalding hot on a minute-by-minute basis. Added to this was water pressure that ran from a trickle to a deluge, again on a minute-by-minute basis.
Since we are on the topic of showers, here’s a tip from Jen for the girls: Bring your own shampoo and conditioner. At no place we stayed were these offered in the rooms. There were the standard small bars of soap, but that was it.
Danta Corcovado Lodge offers all three meals at an additional charge, which is worth it given the lack of a nearby alternative. The meals were good, and the lodge made serious efforts to accommodate Jen.
A final word on Danta Corcovado Lodge: After returning from the backpacking trip to Corcovado, we gave the lodge our very-nasty laundry to wash. When we got our clothes back the following morning, they smelled like cat urine. I am not exaggerating on this. Perhaps they had used a detergent with ammonia in it, or a cat had jumped into the machine — I don’t know. While they looked clean, our clothes had smelled better before the washing.
CORCOVADO NATIONAL PARK
Corcovado has a trail system that looks something like a letter T rotated counter-clockwise, with the top of the T running northwest to southeast along the coast, and the base of the T running southeast to northwest. There are three ranger stations that serve as entrances to the park along this trail system: San Pedrillo on the northwestern extreme along the coast, La Leona on the southeastern extreme along the coast, and Los Patos on the inland extreme to the northeast.
At the intersection of the T is a fourth ranger station, Sirena. This station is the focal point for exploring the park, and is surrounded by a network of 
secondary trails for that purpose.
There are three ways to get to the Sirena station: fly in, boat in, or hike in. Being intrepid explorers, we opted for the hiking.
The classic three-day hiking excursion, as best we could determine, is to enter the park via the Los Patos station, hike the advertised eighteen kilometers to Sirena, stay at Sirena for two nights and a full day, then hike out another eighteen kilometers along the coast to the La Leona station. From La Leona station, you continue to hike an additional three kilometers to the village of Carate, where you can catch a scheduled bus or hire a taxi to take you elsewhere.
Eighteen kilometers is about eleven miles, which translates into four hours of walking under average hiking conditions. That sounded like a relatively easy prospect, with opportunity to see terrain and wildlife not afforded to those who fly or boat in.
We decided to forego use of the Sirena ranger station’s accommodations for lodging and food. For a fee, you can arrange indoor sleeping, in a screen-walled room with a mattress on the floor. You can also arrange to eat meals prepared by the station’s staff. Neither of these appealed to our want for privacy and independence, and we figured it was unlikely the meals would support a vegan diet, so we opted for carrying in a tent and our own food and cooking implements. This meant that we were travelling heavier than hikers using the station’s facilities, who could get by with just what can be carried in a day pack.
You are required to obtain a permit to camp in the park. The normal method of obtaining a permit is via the park’s headquarters, located in the town of Puerto Jimenez. This means the loss of half a day while making these arrangements, and the possibility of the park being booked to capacity on your desired dates. An alternative is using Osa Corcovado Tour and Travel as a broker of sorts, who will take care of getting your tickets and making the necessary payments — for a fee of their own, of course. But the convenience and peace of mind outweighed the additional cost, so we used this service and had our tickets and payment confirmation in hand via e-mail before leaving the States. Osa Corcovado Tour and Travel can be accessed via the website at www.soldeosa.com.
The Hike
According to our research, the Los Patos ranger station will not let you proceed to Sirena after 10:00am, due to concerns that you may not complete the hike prior to dark. The manager for Danta Corcovado Lodge advised us to eat around 6:30am, and then proceed to Los Patos ranger station for an even earlier start. We heeded this advice.
After breakfast, we went to the lodge desk to secure a ride to the ranger station, and were informed that the park had recently introduced mandatory use of guides on the Los Patos – Sirena trail, supposedly due to unrepaired trail damage from the recently-ended rainy season. Jen and I had not wanted to use a guide (we had a topographic map and GPS, and the trail was reportedly well-marked), so this was an unexpected and unwelcome surprise, which leads to a tip: Do not expect your hotel hosts to volunteer information they may have on current park conditions and policies. You will have to interrogate them, and a call to the park’s Puerto Jimenez office is probably not a bad idea, either.
We were told that we could still enter the park without a guide via La Leona station, but that would require a two-hour drive around the peninsula. We decided to gamble on finding a guide at the Los Patos station, which the lodge manager said was very likely (he was now a fountain of knowledge that would have been most useful the night before). For $60 US, the lodge drove us to the Los Patos station via poor trails that required numerous stream crossings.
When we reached the ranger station, we found one guide available. He spoke no English and was of unknown skill, but we were without alternatives. For another $60 US, he was hired and we were off. It was now about 8:00am.
The first part of the hike – a little less than half of the total distance – is up, over, and down the other side of hills that separate the Los Patos ranger station from the coastal plateau that holds Laguna Corcovado and the Sirena ranger station. It is a bit of steep work, with lots of stream and river crossings. Did I 
say lots of stream and river crossings? Well, make that lots and lots of stream and river crossings. Our boots were wet within the first five minutes, and stayed that way for the duration.
December is supposed to be the beginning of the dry season. Don’t count on it. The trail was wet and muddy up to our ankles for sixteen of the advertised eighteen kilometers. This was the kind of mud that pulls at your boots with each step, adding significantly to the duration and challenge of the hike.
After negotiating the high ground — and thinking we were now past the half way point in time, distance, and exertion — we stopped for about half an hour for a short rest and a bit of lunch. Then it was back at it for what we thought was the downhill slide.
Wrong!
The last half was every bit as long and difficult as the front half — maybe even more so. It was a non-stop slog through mud and water, punctuated by frequent stream crossings and a two-hour deluge of rain that rivaled the worst of the Mississippi Gulf Coast thunderstorms I have experienced. The rain was actually a good thing, though, because it provided a much-needed distraction from what had become the drudgery of slogging through a muddy trail in a hot jungle.
Jen is a talented and avid photographer, and we had expected her to take hoards of photographs of flora and fauna; but as the hike became more and more 
of an endurance event — and less and less of a site-seeing event — the photography fell to the wayside. Not that this was really a great loss, as the animal sightings along the way consisted of a lone frog, a lone monkey who mocked us during a stream crossing, and the rear end of what may or may not have been a small tapir.
Our guide was little help in spotting wildlife, thanks to his shared interest in just gutting out the hike. In fact, the guide started to limp significantly about half way into the hike, and we started thinking we might end up having to carry him out. Overall, there really was no need for a guide — particularly one that did not offer the ability to locate and identify unique flora and fauna — as the trail was easily identifiable its entire length.
Finally, at around 5:00pm, we trudged into the Sirena ranger station. This was nine hours after we had started. Subtracting one-and-a-half hours for lunch and breaks, this meant it took us seven-and-a-half hours to cover eighteen kilometers, for an average rate-of-march of one-and-a-half miles per hour. That’s half the pace of a normal hike under load, and we had felt every inch of it.
Now, I have to tell you something. I have hiked all over the world under heavy loads, while covering great distances, and this was the toughest eighteen kilometers I have ever walked. If it hadn’t been muddy, or if we had opted for the ranger station lodging and food and been able to travel lighter, it would have been a bit easier; but as it was, the hike was a slow, painful slog through the mud.
Once at Sirena, we took a break to suck down water and get our feet free of their boots; after which we pitched our tent, showered at the station’s facilities, made dinner, and slept.
A word on the station’s showers, restrooms, and sinks: They are filthy. They only warrant use due to the lack of an alternative, as you are required to camp on the grounds of the station. I would have much preferred a sun shower and a cat hole.
There is a covered and raised portion of the station in which you can camp by pitching your tent under its roof, but we opted to not do this, as every square foot of the covered platform was already jam-packed with tents. Instead, we pitched our tent in the station’s mowed clearing, as far from buildings as we could get. We were alone in this approach, and I suspect the rangers thought we were a bit touched for camping in the open.
The following morning we woke to the sound of howler monkeys roaring throughout the forest as the sky lightened just before sunrise. This is an amazing cacophony that feels prehistoric, and I almost expected giant apes and meat-eating dinosaurs to charge from the jungle.
After coffee and breakfast, we laid out our clothing and equipment to dry and then went exploring.
The beach is about a half mile from the ranger station (a normal half mile, by the way, taking only a few minutes to cover — not the previous day’s half miles that seemed almost infinite). The path to the beach runs through what also serves as a grass airstrip, which we discovered to be an airstrip when a small plane almost ran us over while landing. It was along this path that we spotted red-backed squirrel monkeys, white-faced capuchin monkeys, Central American spider monkeys, peccaries, macaws, and a coati. Farther north along the beach, at the mouth of the Rio Sirena, we spotted two crocodiles, but none of the bull sharks that reportedly inhabit the river.
The second day ended with dinner and packing for the hike to La Leona station the following morning.
The next morning we awoke at 5:00am and were moving at 6:00am. The times were dictated by low tide, as the trail crosses the Rio Clara early on. The tidal range is several feet, and crossing the river on foot is not possible at high tide.
After negotiating the Rio Clara and getting a little extra distance under our belts, we stopped and made coffee on the beach. Then we were off again to tackle the remainder of the eighteen kilometer trail.
This trail was significantly better than the first day’s, with almost no mud; but it was still no cake walk. The trail paralleled the beach, with the bulk of it just inside the forest edge. The remainder required hiking on the beach, with much of this through soft sand. There were numerous stream crossings, and at one point we had to wade through a bit of surf to get around a rocky point. There was also an area where a significant land slide had wiped out the trail, and negotiating this debris field added at least a half hour to the hike.
We reached the La Leona ranger station at around 1:00pm. Subtracting an hour for coffee and breaks, this translates into six hours of walking, or a rate-of-march just shy of two miles per hour. Still very, very slow; but a lightning pace compared to the first day’s hike.
Did I say that we had completed the hike? Well, not really.
Once we reached the La Leona station, we asked about getting a taxi to take us back to Danta Corcovado Lodge, where we had left our SUV and excess baggage, and where we would be spending the night. We were told that we had to walk another three kilometers to Carate to catch the bus; or we could ask 
the hotel staff at the La Leona Ecolodge, located just down the beach, about getting a cab. We chose to stop at La Leona Ecolodge, enlisted their assistance with getting a taxi, ate their food, and drank several of their beers — all the while thinking the cab would pick us up there. Wrong! After the cab had been arranged by a very helpful hotel staff, we were given the news that there is no road connecting Carate with the lodge, and that we would indeed have to hike the additional three kilometers. With a belly full of food and beer, we slogged this last leg along a soft beach to the under-construction airfield at Carate, where our driver was waiting for us at the appointed time. Two hours and $125 US later, we were back at Danta Corcovado Lodge.
Lessons Learned
My first lesson learned would be to not hike into Corcovado National Park. Fly or go by boat, but do not hike.
I am of the opinion that one should not travel to another country to do and see things that can be done and seen at home. It makes no sense, for example, to travel half-way around the globe just to hang out at a resort’s swimming pool. You can do that at much less cost at any resort in the States.
Applying this logic to Corcovado, it makes no sense to expend two days gutting out a difficult hike that offers no unique experiences beyond the physical challenge. If it’s just a punishing hike that you want, then stay home, strap a heavy pack on your back, and head out for the day — preferably after a healthy rain that has turned the world to mud. You’ll save yourself a great deal of expense.
Our experience indicates that hiking into Corcovado does not give you a unique wildlife viewing opportunity. What we saw for most of the hike was the mud on the trail in front of our feet as we picked the next step in our slog through the forest. Meanwhile, significant wildlife viewing can be easily had in the area immediately surrounding the Sirena ranger station.
So, do yourself a favor, and fly or boat directly to Sirena. Use the time you would have been marching to do the thing you really came to do: viewing the flora and fauna.
And now some lessons learned for those who ignore the above advice and opt to torture themselves for no good purpose…
Plan your trip toward the end of the dry season, so that you have a better shot at a dry trail. If it has been raining a lot and the trails are super muddy, reconsider your hiking plans and grab a boat or a plane to Sirena.
Even if it’s late in the dry season, waterproof your gear like it’s going for a swim. When it rains, it really rains.
If you must get a guide, reserve him in advance and make sure he is a good one — one that can speak passable English and help you spot the wildlife that you came to see. I really don’t have a good bit of advice on how to go about this, as we got stuck with the only available guide at the last minute.
Travel light. You could achieve some of this by making arrangements to eat at the ranger station in Sirena, which removes food and cooking equipment from your pack. You could also reduce the water you carry by taking a single water bottle and a backpacking water filter, as there are numerous streams along the trails from which to draw water. Finally, you could forego a sleeping bag for just a travel sheet or bag liner, as it is too hot for a sleeping bag of any kind, anyway.
On the topic of drinking water, you can count on at least one gallon per person for each leg of the trail, and that’s being conservative. But if you follow our advice and take along a water purifier, this will not be an issue. At Sirena, we were able to buy bottled water from the rangers.
You are required to pack your garbage out of the park — there is no place to dump it, even at the Sirena ranger station. So bring the requisite garbage bags to contain it.
Take a pair of hiking sandals. You can put them on for the endless stream crossings and have a shot at keeping your boots and socks dry. If the sandals are comfortable enough and your load is light, you might consider wearing them all the way vice wearing boots.
The Costa Rican topographic maps suck. I acquired a set for Corcovado that is produced by the National Geographic Institute of Costa Rica. They were inaccurate in many respects, with the Los Patos – Sirena trail portrayed inaccurately, and one river mislabeled on the route to La Leona. I imagine they are better than nothing, but the inaccuracies became frustrating to the point that I stopped looking at the maps altogether and just trudged on.
The Mystery of the Costa Rican Kilometer
Related to hiking is the apparent elasticity of the Costa Rican kilometer. I had always been under the impression that the kilometer was a fixed unit of distance, but now know I was mistaken.
On the hike, I would ask the guide how much farther we had to go. For about three hours of walking, his response remained thirteen kilometers.
There are distance markers on the Los Patos – Sirena trail, constructed of plastic tube-sticks with attached metal dogs tags on which distances are embossed. Markers are placed roughly every hundred meters. At one point a marker indicted 9,400 meters remaining. A hundred meters later the marker indicated 7,100 meters remaining.
The expansion and contraction of distance continued throughout the trip. Ask a ranger at La Leona station how far to Carate, and he’ll say 3,000 meters. Go another 1,000 meters, ask a hotel clerk at La Leona Ecolodge, and he’ll say that you are still 3,000 meters from Carate. Walk to Carate, and you’ll swear they were both wrong.
And then there’s that highly impressive one-and-a half mile per hour rate-of-march we attained on the Los Patos-Sirena trail. After years of hiking under load as an infantryman, I know what one-and-a-half miles per hour feels like, what three miles per hour feels like, and what four miles per hour feels like. I am still convinced that we were keeping an average three mile per hour pace on the hike, but can’t account for the missing eighteen kilometers. We would hit a fairly flat stretch of the trail and clip along at a good pace for half an hour, only to have the trail markers tell us that we had barely covered a kilometer. It was frustrating.
So, here’s my new math for calculating the time to complete a hike in Costa Rica, when faced with a kilometer that does not conform to the rules of physics that govern the remainder of the universe.
1) One Costa Rican kilometer equals one statute mile (a statute mile being 1.6 kilometers).
2) If it is muddy, multiply this by a factor of 1.25.
3) To get an estimate of how long it will take to cover the distance, divide the product by 3 (based upon a speed of 3.5 miles per hour, which yields a rate-of-march of 3 miles per hour after allowing for hourly breaks).
So, in the case of our 18 kilometer slog from Los Patos to Sirena, the math would have been [(18 x 1.25) = 22.5] / 3 = 7.5 hours.
Apply this to the Sirena – La Leona trail, and the math is [(18 x 1) = 18] / 3 = 6 hours.
DRAKE BAY
The next day, we headed to Drake Bay, which is advertised as an isolated location, accessible by vehicle only during the dry season, and then only with a four-wheel drive vehicle. Other than that, it is reached by boat or plane.
Armed with a four-wheel drive SUV, we headed out by road. The road from Rincon to Drake Bay is a dirt tract, and it is bumpy as hell for the most part. There are stream crossings that would be challenging after a heavy rain, but we had no troubles. With a two-wheel drive car? Well, that would have been a different story. But there was a public bus that negotiated the route at a pretty good clip, so maybe it can be done.
It is some thirty kilometers from Rincon to Drake Bay, through hills and valleys. At points it is quite picturesque, with some great scenes of Costa Rican pastures populated by cattle and horses, and framed by tropical growth. The going is slow due to the condition of the road, but it’s a pleasant drive.
At one point, we stopped on the side of the road to take photographs and drink a beer, with macaws flying overhead and some parrots making noise in a nearby tree.
Our hotel, Pirate Cove, was found right as we entered Drake Bay. It consists of a central structure containing the office, kitchen, and open-air dining area; and surrounded by small stand-alone bungalows. There is an additional structure containing a handful of side-by-side rooms that the hotel calls “cabins” on its web page. We stayed in one of these “cabins” in the larger building, as the stand-alone bungalows are closer to the central common area and therefore have a lesser degree of privacy.
The hotel is located on an embankment above the beach, with a short walkway down to the water. At beach level there is a SCUBA diving facility and associated boats, and the hotel advertises itself as a PADI diving establishment.
The staff of the hotel is nice, and they did a decent job accommodating Jen’s vegan diet. Special meals were provided.
The accommodations themselves were — how should I put it — rustic. That in and of itself is not so much of an issue, but there is a definite lack of privacy. Even in the larger building that contains the “cabins,” sound transfers between rooms almost like the walls are non-existent. As with almost every place we stayed in Costa Rica, the bath water was variable in temperature and pressure.
I guess this would all still have been fine if the cost had reflected the quality of the accommodations, but at $180 US per night for the both of us, there didn’t seem to be a good correlation between value and expenditure. On the other hand, Pirate Cove is given a 4-1/2 out of 5 rating on TripAdvisor, so maybe that’s just simply where the bar is set in Drake Bay.
The next morning, we took a snorkeling trip to Cano Island, this being the point of our stay at Drake Bay. We had read that diving and snorkeling at Cano Island is exceptional, so we thought we’d take a look.
The trip was arranged through the hotel, using what appeared to be a boat and staff from their dive operation. We were the only two passengers from Pirate Cove, and we picked up two additional passengers from another hotel along the way.
The ride to Cano Island takes about forty-five minutes. Once there, we joined a large number of similar boats from other snorkeling operations, all spewing snorkelers into the water. We were literally swimming in tourists.
Lunch was done ashore on the island, at the same time and location as every other boatload of snorkelers. Consequently, the picnic area was very crowded, 
and the waters just outside the surf zone were equally crowded with the waiting boats. Entertainment was provided by watching the boats negotiate the sometimes-large surf to discharge or pickup snorkelers, which offered a few holy-shit-someone’s-going-to-get-hurt moments. Thankfully, we witnessed no boat-to-human collisions.
After lunch, it was back to snorkeling for a bit, and from there back to the hotel.
Before I comment on the quality of the snorkeling, let me give you my background on things watery.
I have been a SCUBA diving instructor in Hawaii and a military diver; have hundreds of SCUBA dives logged in the Hawaiian Islands, Okinawa, and Southern California; and have snorkeled a bit in the Caribbean. So I may be approaching this bit of commentary from a spoiled perspective.
Now, with that out of the way…
I really found nothing unique about the snorkeling at Cano Island. The water clarity was not particularly great – certainly not Caribbean level, and still paling in comparison to the waters of Hawaii. The quantity and variety of fish life was about the same as Hawaii. Meanwhile, coral formations were not spectacular or plentiful — less than Hawaii (which is really dying out since my first dives there in the 1980’s), and way-less than the US Virgin Islands. Add to this the mass of snorkelers that covered the water like an oil slick, and I just don’t see Cano Island as living up to the hype.
Does this apply to all of Costa Rica? I don’t know, because I haven’t been to the rest of Costa Rica; but the fact that Cano Island is considered second only to Coco Island, and the fact that shore diving is not considered all that good thanks to murkiness from river runoff, do not make me too optimistic.
After returning from the snorkeling trip, we cleaned up and went in search of a place to get something to eat and a drink. The first place we found was the Restaurante Jade Mar, strategically placed at a road junction as we headed deeper into Drake Bay from the hotel. It was the afternoon, and other than us there was only a handful of other customers in this open-air establishment. Two observations on this joint: service is slower than molasses in the winter, and the margaritas are superb. The woman behind the bar hand-squeezed limes for the drinks, which is always a good sign. After each of us had drunk two of these, we had reached the continue-at-your-own-peril point and retreated back to the hotel.
Dinner at the hotel was a New Year’s Eve feast. They put out a good spread with drinks included, and again produced a vegan-friendly meal for Jen.
BORUCA AND THE DRIVE BACK TO ALAJUELA
The next morning we hit the road again, this time with the destination of Boruca.
Boruca is a small village of indigenous people located in southern Costa Rica, east of Palmar Sur. We had found mention of the town in the Footprint Handbook for Costa Rica, which noted that it has an annual celebration of three days around the New Year. The celebration is entitled La Danza de los Diablitos (The Dance of the Devils), and is described as a three-day festival involving masks and costumes that symbolizes the Boruca tribe’s resistance to the Spanish conquistadors. This sounded interesting to us, due both to the festival’s description and the isolation and lack of tourism implied by the description.
I could find no hotels listed for Boruca on any web sites, with only a terse mention in the Footprint travel book of a single hotel (but no contact information). Consequently, this was the one leg of the trip for which we had no reserved accommodations. As we figured it, the worst case would be to pitch our tent somewhere for the night.
The drive to Boruca was fairly uneventful. We left the Osa Peninsula along the same route we had taken in, fueled the SUV in Palmar Norte, and after a bit of a search found somewhere to eat.
It seems that most everything shuts down in Costa Rica on New Year’s Day. That would seem obvious, I guess; except that few things had been closed on Christmas Day. This led me to wrongly assume that New Year’s Day would be comparable.
The food hunt had us entering — and quickly exiting — a not-so-inviting Chinese restaurant in Palmar Norte that seemed to be the only open joint in town. Thankfully, about three miles east of Palmar Norte along Highway 2, we found a hotel and restaurant that was very nice. This place, whose name I have lost and cannot relocate despite hours of internet searching (but it ain’t hard to find as it’s about all there is east of the town), did a good job of accommodating Jen’s vegan diet, and the grounds and cabins looked very nice — so much so that we inquired into a room, but they were unfortunately all taken.
After eating, we continued east on Highway 2, looking for a sign indicating a dirt track to Boruca. Eventually, we hit the crossroads village of Paso Real, which is a few kilometers east of where our maps indicated the road to Boruca should have been. We had clearly missed the intersection.
We stopped at a roadside food stand and snack joint, where I entered into a discussion of sorts with a man who patiently endured my butchering of the Spanish language, asked about where I lived in the States, and told me that the intersection for Boruca was five kilometer back to the west.
So, back we went. After driving the indicated five kilometers, we had still not seen a sign or road intersection, so we stopped at a small roadside fruit stand. This man said that the intersection was yet another five kilometers down the road (another case of the Costa Rican kilometer, perhaps).
On we went, eventually coming across the intersection with a sign clearly indicating the way to Boruca, but only to traffic from the east — those coming like we had from the west were left to guess. Signs that serviced traffic coming from only one of two possible directions was a common theme on our trip. Perhaps tasking someone to look rearward and read signs is a worthwhile practice in Costa Rica.
The dirt road to Boruca is eight kilometers along steep inclines into the hills. We saw some sedans driving the road, but it was dry, and even then a four wheel drive vehicle is advisable. Throw in some rain and a SUV would be essential.
Once in Boruca, we were somewhat under-impressed. No festival activity ongoing that we could see — just folks hanging out and drinking and eating at the bar-restaurant at the town’s main intersection, some taxis and buses, and a fair number of obvious tourists. Taking directions from a local, we drove by what may have been the hotel, which had some unhappy-looking tourists hanging around its driveway entrance. I don’t know if it was really a hotel or someone’s boarding operation, but either way it was not inviting enough to stop.
After completing the short drive through the village, we decided that whatever festival may happen here was not worth the dreary atmosphere. Perhaps there had at one time been a unique festival in a remote village called Boruca, but it had now been found by a noticeable number of tourists, and looked more like a bunch of unhappy folks wandering dusty roads.
We stopped at the main intersection of town, I struggled through my minimal Spanish to obtain directions from a local, and we pointed the SUV out of town toward Terraba, where we would rejoin Highway 2 for the drive north.
Now it was the hunt for somewhere to stay the night, along the route back to Alajuela.
Highway 2 wound through hilly countryside, often slow going due to the road mostly being only two lanes with a large number of trucks. On the plus side, the road is well maintained and easy driving.
Still not having found any place to stay, we entered the city of San Isidro de El General. We spent about two hours in the city looking for a hotel — talking to a cab driver, attempting to find a working pay phone to call the hotels in our travel guide (never did find a working phone), convincing a clerk at a hotel we had no intention of staying at that he should let us use his hotel’s phone to call other hotels (we were successful in convincing him, but all the numbers turned out to be bad), and trying to get Jen’s iPhone to make a call (which it did for one number, but the call got us to a private residence and not a hotel).
After two hours, we called it quits and resigned ourselves to the hope of finding a decent place along the highway.
Now a word on San Isidro de El General: Avoid it. If you must go through it, have every passenger in the car cover their eyes until you have passed through. It is a very unattractive city. Enough said.
Finally, about thirty minutes north of San Isidro de El General on Highway 2, with the sun going down, we ran into Mirador Valle del General. This hotel is a family operation. The mother takes care of the rooms, the brother is the front man and handles what constitutes the front desk, and the sister is in the kitchen. The restaurant and kitchen and front desk are all in a single building beside the highway. The rooms are in a single building a ways down a steep embankment that has an equally steep driveway leading to it.
The family was very nice, showing us the one available room to make sure we were happy with it. The building that contains the rooms is rustic, and the soundproofing between rooms is questionable. We would have preferred a stand-alone cabin, as always; but the hotel is clean and pleasing to the eye, and we were without other options. The restaurant was accommodating to Jen’s diet, with both dinner and breakfast being fairly good.
The next morning we continued our drive back to Alajuela, passing around the capitol city of San Juan by way of its southern beltway. Neither Jen nor I are particularly attracted to large cities. While I imagine there are interesting sights and things to do in the heart of San Juan, from the beltway we could see nothing but the litter of strip malls, construction, and fast food joints that are common to all cities.
By early afternoon, we had arrived back at the Hotel La Rosa de America, checked into our room, and taken a freezing jump into the hotel’s pool after a couple beers.
For lunch and dinner, we ate at one of three restaurants within walking distance of the hotel, after which we stopped at a bar-restaurant still closer to the hotel for a drink. Then it was back to the hotel for the night.
DEPARTURE
Jen left Costa Rica a day earlier than me, a result of last minute changes to my itinerary and fully-booked, peak season flights.
Jen’s return was a bit of a nightmare. It started with extensive lines for her flight, made all the longer by a significant delay in the flight that translated into folks having to seek alternatives for connecting flights they were now going to miss in Houston. Jen missed her connection in Houston, went through a load of airline bureaucracy to finally get a new flight, but had to fly into Sacramento instead of San Francisco and rent a one-way car to get home — a day later than planned.
The lessons learned from her experience are to allow at least three hours to get checked in for a flight departing San Jose, schedule your return home for a day earlier than when you have to be back at work, and try to leave San Jose during a weekday, as weekend departure flights were fully booked. Perhaps worth mentioning is that one guy I spoke with said that all of his last six flights out of Costa Rica had been delayed. Probably not everyone’s experience, but it does illustrate the need to build a lot of slop room into your return schedule.
My departure the next day, which was a weekday, was without delays or problems.
The departure process at the airport is not exactly intuitive. Although the airport is small, it would be easy to spend more time in lines than necessary.
The first step is to pay your departure tax, which requires you to walk into the airport and go to the lines and service desk to your right. Here, you complete a form, pay the departure tax ($26 US as of this writing), and get a stamped receipt that you will need to check into your flight. This is where several folks experienced unnecessary delays, as they stood in lengthy lines to check-in for their flights, only to then discover that they first had to negotiate the departure tax line. It is recommended that you bring your own pen to complete the forms.
After paying the departure tax, you get into the line to check-in with the airline, get your boarding pass, go through a police checkpoint where your boarding pass and passport are examined, complete the security screening, and proceed to your gate.
The airport itself offers very few amenities. There is no restaurant. There is a food court with a Schlotzsky’s, Papa John’s Pizza, Church’s Chicken, and a Burger King; but if you are looking for something more than over-priced fast food, you will be out of luck. There is one venue that claims to be a bar — it is at basement level, filled with smokers, only serves local beer in a can, is little more than a room with cheap chairs and a few tables, and probably only sees a broom every week or so. There is no bookstore, and the shop next to the food court carries a very, very limited selection of reading material. Oh, and everything inside the airport is stupidly expensive by any standards, US or Costa Rican. Do yourself a favor: Eat before you go to the airport, and bring your reading materials with you.
Finally, while getting the SUV from Thrifty was pretty painless, turning the rental back in was not. This was due to the rental office requiring returning customers to stand in line with newly-arrived customers and be seen by an agent in order to drop off the vehicle. Depending upon the number of tourists that are in line to check-out a car, this can easily translate into an hour or more standing in line to do what takes only moments back in the States. That is what happened to me, and it was a bit frustrating.
GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF COSTA RICA
Cost Rica is beautiful. Its countryside, coastline, mountains, jungles, rivers, streams — all are head-turners.
Unfortunately, the country appears to have been heavily tarnished by tourism. Appeals to English-speaking tourists are pervasive, including signage at what seemed every turn that touts the next vacation housing development. Despite our efforts to get to places advertised as off the beaten path, we were unable to avoid rubbing elbows with other tourists. Add to that the inflated lodging prices that inevitably result from a well-grown tourist industry, and it was a bit disheartening. We could imagine what Costa Rica must have been like a decade or two ago, and wished we had been able to see it first hand, but those days are gone.
Throughout Costa Rica, the marketing buzzword is “ecotourism;” and that is what it is, a marketing buzzword — like “healthy,” “low fat,” “sugar free,” and other phrases have become marketing buzzwords in the food industry. What the word “ecotourism” appears to really be is not so much a statement of real environmental conscientiousness, but rather an excuse for offering cold water, poor construction, and dirty linen; all the while charging rates that exceed those of a four star resort in Hawaii. OK, maybe I am being a bit theatrical in this commentary, but I could not help but see a correlation between poor services, tent-like facilities, high prices, and claims of being an ecotourism venue. I kept waiting for a hotel to charge me extra for the privilege of letting me wash my own sheets by hand or cook my own breakfast, all the while telling me that I was gaining an authentic Costa Rican experience and saving the environment.
Did I have fun in Costa Rica? Yes.
Am I glad I went to Costa Rica? Yes.
Am I in a hurry to return? No. Not that I won’t ever return, but there are many places that have now moved above Costa Rica on my travel list.
EQUIPMENT AND RESOURCE REVIEW
And now for the last section on our Costa Rica excursion…Commentary on some of the equipment and research material we used.
We both used Mountainsmith backpacks, purchased for this trip. I used the Circuit 3.0 pack, and Jen used the Boundary pack. Neither of us liked our packs, the primary problem being the waist belt, which rubbed large raw spots on both our hips. In my case, the skin was still repairing itself two months after the trip. The waist belts are simply too large for people with our waist sizes (I have a 29-inch waist, for example), causing the load to ride too far down on the hips. I called Mountainsmith about this, asking about obtaining a smaller waist belt, but they only have one size available for a given pack. I guess I could have cannibalized Jen’s pack for her smaller waist belt, but that isn’t exactly a real solution from the manufacturer. And it was not the overall size of the packs that was the problem, as they both matched our torso lengths. Other problems were that the detachable lid kept pulling itself aft and over the frame, to the point of allowing rainwater to pool at the top of the pack and flow into its interior (and the tops only have a single closure — not the double draw-string closures found in many packs); and the bungee cord on a water bottle pocket pulled free of its stitching on the second day of use. My old, Vietnam-era, military issue, large ALICE pack is a far-superior product.
The tent we used was a Eureka Pinnacle Pass 2XTA, which was a winner. It sustained two hours of serious, serious rain without so much as a single drip.
The stove we carried was a MSR Whisperlite Internationale, in which I burned unleaded gasoline (the only fuel I could find despite constant inquiries on the road). This, too, was a winner.
For water purification, we used a Katadyn Hiker Pro Microfilter. It was easy to use, lightweight, and neither of us got sick. It was a winner.
I used the current Marine Corps combat boot, which has suede leather and Gortex uppers. The pair I used on the hike into Corcovado had performed well during a strenuous combat tour in Iraq, in which they had spent their fair share of time in mud, water, and who knows what all else. But Corcovado? Well, they fell apart in Corcovado and found their way to a trash bin once we completed that part of the trip.
As for information on Corcovado National Park, the best resource we found was the web site www.corcovadoguide.com, which has a wealth of information and photographs on the park, its facilities, and the trails.
For a travel guide, we used the Footprint Costa Rica Handbook. I found it to be of marginal utility. A large percentage of the hotels than can be found by a quick internet search are not listed in the book, the index is poor, and you have to hunt and peck through the book to find things. Next time, I would give the Lonely Planet guide a try.
We also used the National Geographic Traveler guidebook. It is useful with making the macro-level plan for your trip — where you want to go and what you want to do. It is not useful for planning the details, like what hotel you are going to use or the restaurant at which you will eat. You will still need something like the Footprint or Lonely Planet books for the detailed stuff.
We took along a Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Spanish-English Dictionary. Since I have a little knowledge of Spanish sentence structure, I thought I could get by without a phrasebook. If I was to do it again, I would also take along a pocket phrasebook.
For wildlife identification, we had the Costa Rica edition of the Travellers’ Wildlife Guides. It was a bit bulky to cart around, but it was put to use more than once. We also had the wildlife, birds, and butterflies and moths pocket guides that are produced by Waterford Press. These are laminated, accordion-fold pocket guides, published under the heading of A Pocket Naturalist Guide. Jen used the butterflies and moths card quite a bit.
The hands-down best road map we found is a large, waterproof, fold-out map produced by mapcr.com. Their web site is, of course, www.mapcr.com. The map is listed as Waterproof Travel Map, and can be ordered online. This web site has a great deal of other information that would be worth exploring, too.
As to topographic maps…Well, I already vented my spleen on that topic.
Finally, I took along a travel kit for power conversion, but this was not necessary. 110 volt power, with the same outlets as used in the States, was all that we encountered.
For more photographs from our Costa Rica trip, go to our Flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/refractoryroad/sets/72157624545589329/.