Typical Borucan architecture
Luis Carlos and me at the edge of a waterfall
Our view the whole hike back
At Sirena ranger station
One of many rivers we crossed
Summer break in Quebradas in coming to a close, but the weather is only getting hotter. It was not until last week, when I ventured south of San Isidro for the first time since I’ve been here, that I appreciated how much worse it could be. Last Tuesday my friend Nate came down to visit from Bolivia, where he has been living since November. He crashed on my air mattress for a few nights and came to my classes and meetings, and it was really fun to compare our daily lives in two different Latin American cultures, as well as similarities and differences in language, food (apparently in Bolivia they consume an equally ridiculous amount of starch but it comes from potatoes), and bus systems, or lack thereof. It was also fun to introduce him to some of my friends in the community since he speaks Spanish and could hang, though they had a bit of trouble pronouncing his name.
On Friday we took a 6 hour bus down to Puerto Jimenez on the Osa Peninsula and spent the afternoon kayaking around a mangrove swamp and swimming in super clear deserted water. Then we loaded up on a hearty dinner of fresh fish and a brownie with ice cream to prepare for our two-day adventure in Corcovado National Park, known as the most concentrated bio-diverse area in the Southern Hemisphere.
The journey started with catching a 5:30 am bus to a nearby community and then finding a guy on the street with 4-wheel drive to take us to the ranger station, which entailed crossing about 19 rivers. We set off for our actual hike, overnight backpacks in tow, at about 7:30 and spent the next 7 hours trekking up and down hills, crossing rivers, listening to the insanely loud sounds of the insects in the rainforest, and spotting an occasional cool looking bird, butterfly, and anteater-like mammal that we couldn’t identify since we had chosen not to go with a guide. We also did not see another human until we arrived at our destination, which was the Sirena ranger station located on the coast in the middle of the park. There was a big lodge there with hikers from all over the world, which was pretty cool. In the dining hall that night we heard English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch being spoken. We were very tempted to jump in the ocean as soon as we arrived but were warned there were crocodiles and sharks, so better to go to the nearby river, which turned out to be another 45-minute walk. I suppose distances are all relative when you’re actually in the middle of nowhere. We got a pretty hearty meal that night and then pretty much went straight to bed, both out of exhaustion and because they turned off the electricity in the entire lodge at 8:45 to save energy.
The next day we hiked out on a trail that ran along the beach the entire way. It was milder terrain but much hotter and so so beautiful. We hiked with a couple we met at the lodge who live in Dominical, and throughout the course of the next seven hours learned, among many other things, that the man is a Portuguese travel journalist and the woman is a Polish masters’ student writing a thesis on the migration of Polish Jews to Costa Rica. Who knew? Anyway that was fun and made the time pass and we also saw some amazing scarlet macaws and wild boars, which I would say were the highlights of our wildlife viewing. The hike out took about 7 hours as well, and our new friends drove us back to Puerto Jimenez and we got some cold drinks and went our separate ways, but I hope to see them again. That evening we met up with my friend Laura who lives in a nearby community and gorged on Italian food and felt really good about ourselves for hiking about 20 kilometers two days in a row.
The next morning, however, I came down off that high and found myself sore in very strange places such as the backs of my knees, realized how much all my clothes stunk, and spent 6 hours cramped up on a hot bus after saying goodbye to Nate, who flew back to San José en route to Bolivia. We also both realized in subsequent days that we had brought a little of the nature back with us in the form of ticks, but I think I snagged all the suckers before they could do any serious damage.
All in all, it was a really cool, off-the-beaten-path adventure in every sense of the cliché.
This week consisted of a lot of editing and designing for the third version of our community newspaper, English classes, and meeting with my guy at the Ministry of Agriculture to talk about starting to plant the greenhouse at the school, which made me realize I really have no idea how to do anything I intend to teach the kids, so I need to start studying up. I also got the big bummer news that the teacher who I was working with on recycling and planning to work with on the greenhouse is transferring to another school, and our school director is changing, so that leaves everything a little more up in the air, and I am sad because she was really organized and motivated, and that combination is hard to come by. But I can’t let myself get discouraged before I even give it a try.
Today I went on a trip with the women’s group that runs the volunteer exchange program in Quebradas to an indigenous reserve 2 hours south of San Isidro called Boruca. Every year the group likes to visit a community that runs a similar program to exchange ideas and see how they work. There is a Peace Corps Volunteer working in Boruca, so I arranged the visit and other than it being super hot and dry and Ticos in general not liking to walk, especially in those conditions, the visit went well and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. This community is very well-organized for tourism, and their main source of income are these masks they carve out of local wood and paint in beautiful colors and intricate designs. They also do a lot of weaving using natural dyes, so we got to see a little bit of that process. It looks like a pretty typical rural Costa Rican community, but some of the houses are made of the traditional thatched roofs and some signs are written in their local language and they are definitely very proud of their heritage and the history of their community more than I have observed anywhere else I have visited in Costa Rica. So hopefully this will provide some motivation and new ideas for our women’s group, which is doing fine but could use some new activities and better organization.
Tomorrow is election day, so there will be voting at the elementary school in Quebradas. The streets were pretty hectic today with caravans of campaigners, and it doesn’t seem to be a given who is going to win, so it will be exciting to follow. My taxi driver tonight told me he doesn’t like either of the candidates but he is going to vote (as most of the population does here, they are automatically registered when they turn 18), so he is just going to flip a coin in the voting booth. If that is how the future of the country is decided, it should make for an interesting next four years…
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