Hiking through the "Most Biologically Intense Place on Earth"

A view of the fer-de-lance that we
narrowly avoided

"Stop! Stop! Stop!" my trail guide Felix yelled in one panicked breath as he came to an abrupt halt and shoved me backwards. We had both been within one step of a fer-de-lance snake that lay coiled up in the middle of our path. As Felix later explained, the snake was the deadliest in all of Latin America; if one of us had been bitten, we'd have been dead within two hours without getting serious medical attention. The antidote he was carrying wasn't going to cut it.

That news unnerved me a bit. At that point, we were smack in the middle of our hike and the nearest hospital was a four-hour hike and a plane ride away. We would have been in serious trouble if Felix hadn't had his eyes open or if the snake had been facing our direction instead of away from us. Especially disconcerting was the fact that Felix, a guide on these trails for over ten years, seemed to be fairly shaken himself by the close encounter. When I asked him what we would have done in the case of a bite, he shook his head and very sincerely responded: "Man, I don't know. I really don't even wanna think about that."

This was just a glimpse of my introduction to Corcovado National Park, the Osa Peninsula's rainforest that National Geographic once famously called the "most biologically intense place on earth."

One of my favorite animals of the
trip: the lesser anteater

Although the trip was a brief one, it certainly did not disappoint. In just two days of hiking and camping, I saw dozens of wild macaws (one was kind enough to relieve itself on my backpack), a number of coatimundis, four different species of monkey, a handful of peccaries, two river otters, an anteater, a poison dart frog, and two more deadly snakes. I was also informed by another group that we narrowly missed seeing four sharks circling the water offshore. Darn! The views were beautiful, the trails were challenging, and virtually everything was new to me. I've done plenty of hiking in the US before, but Corcovado was definitely an entirely different experience.

Preparing to board the
infamous collectivo

On the first day of our trip, we began the morning with a two-and-a-half hour ride on the one-of-a-kind "collectivo," a small truck that serves as a crude form of public transportation in Osa. With over forty people packed into the covered truck bed and with deep potholes littering the already bumpy road, the collectivo was an adventure. It somehow eliminated personal space in a way that the even the NYC subways fail to do, and the whole time I kept likening the experience to playing a two-and-a-half hour game of Twister on the rickety Coney Island Cyclone. Butt-to-hip. Forearm-to-forehead. Elbow-to-ribcage. Armpit-to-cheek. It was like speed-dating for body parts. My favorite part of the ride was when Rochelle, one of the girls who came on the trip with us, tried to get her camera out and temporarily blinded the man next to her by accidentally taking a picture of him, double flash and all, at point blank range. That was awesome.

This was a common view
on our first day of hiking

Once we got off the collectivo, we had 20km to hike to the ranger station where we planned to camp out. It was a very pretty trek along the Pacific that brought us in and out of the coastal rainforest and onto the beach. We saw lots of wildlife, drank some coconut milk, and helped a fellow hiker repair a shoe that had lost its sole. A couple of hours before sundown, we arrived at the ranger station and pitched our tents. One of the trail guides was even kind enough to give us his extras for dinner so we didn't even have to cook. (Although I think that irked my friend Juan Luis more than anything else; he'd carried 2kg of rice all day for nothing!)

The next morning, I met Felix and he told me that he'd be hiking out through the heart of the park and coming out the other side. That was the hike I'd been hoping to do before coming down, but I had been originally told that the trail was closed because of heavy rain and high tides in the rivers. I was pretty disappointed about not being able to go, so when Felix invited me along I didn't hesitate to join. I parted ways with the friends I had come down with and planned to meet up with them in a day or two. Before I left, though, I had to switch backpacks with Rochelle, as mine had come apart at the seams the day before. I was hoping to avoid a repeat of our hike into the park, during which I'd been forced to carry my backpack overhead for the last hour-and-a-half of our hike into the park. Since Rochelle was planning to take a boat back to our meeting point, we figured the backpack swap wouldn't be too much of a burden for her. Hopefully that was the case!

One of the milder river crossings
of the day

This second hike was even better than the first. Our small group consisted of Felix, a 29-year-old British guy named Lewis, and myself. In total, we traveled 31km and managed over twenty river crossings in about 7 hours. We left the coastal rainforest and really got to explore the thick of Corcovado. It wasn't the most challenging hiking I've done, but it was undoubtedly the most dangerous. In addition to the snakes, Felix informed us that roughly 80% of the spiders in Corcovado were poisonous. Needless to say, we had to be on our guard the entire time! It was definitely an exciting way to spend some of my final days in Costa Rica and I know it's an experience I'll always remember.

Tomorrow, I'm heading to Chirripó with my boss Pablo to climb the highest mountain in Costa Rica. With any luck, we can avoid another fer-de-lance disaster!