Costa Rica

Central America Caribbean » Costa Rica
May 2nd 2009

Published: May 17th 2009

Edit Blog Post

whitehorse

Turtle Tracks

With a few great weeks of Nicaragua under our belt, we headed south once again into Costa Rica. Having heard from many people that Costa Rica is too developed, expensive and not as good as Nicaragua or Panama, we decided to focus on a few National Parks too see for ourselves.

After dealing with cordobas in Nicaragua for a few weeks, where a Canadian dollar would get around 15, 450 colones made everything seem really expensive. (Which it usually was a bit more!) We hopped on a few busses and headed down to National Park Chirripo. Having heard good things about it and loving hiking, we decided to tackle this 3900m meter summit (second only in Central America to Tajulmoco in Guatamala). We rented some gear in the small town of San Gerardo and enjoyed a really great Costa Rican park experience. The hike was awesome and we both agreed it was one of the better places we have ever hiked. It might have been partly due to spending so much time in dirtier places along the way, but we found Chirripo clean, unique and beautiful. The hike starts down around 1500m in a beautiful lush valley full of cloud

Scarlet Macaw

forests. Along the way up to the top, you pass through cloud forests, rainforests, pine forests, scrub forests and finally reach the alpine. We were surprised to see this here and it actually reminded us a lot like the Yukon (except all the little lizards running around). At the top they have a really nice facility to stay in with dorm style rooms and good cooking facilities. We both commented how it was probably the nicest park facility we had ever seen. The next morning we got up and hiked all around the alpine area before heading back down to San Gerardo.

From here we hopped on a very crowded and busy bus and stood for six hours as we made our way out to Corcovado national park. We stayed in a neat little tent on the edge of another of Costa Rica's National parks and enjoyed the extensive amount of wildlife in the area. We relaxed on the beach for the first day and followed it up with a 30 km hike into the park in +35 C weather! The experience was super hot, but was worth it because of all the wildlife we saw. We saw scarlet

Sunset in Carate

macaws, florescent tree frogs, ant-eaters, three different kinds of monkeys, racoons, a tapir, a snake, a wild pack of pigs and other mysterious animals running around in the forest. We both agreed it was a place we would like to come back to and camp inside the park.
Another highlight of corcovado was seeing a Olive Ridley Turtle lay her eggs on the beach. As it was a full moon when we were there, we took a hike down the beach at night and lucked out to find a turtle climbing out of the water to lay her eggs! We snuck up on it and watched it for about an hour as she dug a hole, lay her eggs and buried them before heading back to the water. It was a very cool experience and a highlight of the trip!

After our few days around Corcovado and the heat we knew it was time to keep moving on. A final boat ride, bus ride and taxi ride put us at the Panamanian boarder. Only a short visit to Costa Rica but definitely a good one. We can see ourselves coming back here again.

Additional photos below

Photos: 40, Displayed: 24