This was no guided tour or typical Costa Rican outing - my first time in the wild here was with a couple dozen Italians.
Late last week I was informed that a group of Italians (most from Rome) who had been building a church in Nicaragua would be dropping by Miravalles (where I live) and planned to take a hike nearby.
I was invited and, along with one Costa Rican, loaded onto the bus on Saturday morning.
The Italians spent most of the hour-long trip out of town singing love songs and soccer chants to their group director, Sergio Rossi. Yes, Italians.
After climbing up into the mountains a bit, our bus pulled over beside the road, everyone piled out and we just took off straight into the jungle. Our single Costa Rican companion Pedro, was mildly dismayed at the apparent directionlessness of the endeavor.
We waited by the highway in a cold rain as the leaders began to cut a path and everyone else sang the Indiana Jones theme. Italians have a hard time being quite for more than a minute of two at a time. It worked out quite well though, and after twenty minutes of cutting our way through, we found a fair-sized stream and began to ascend. We followed the course for about an hour and a half, occasionally needing to swim when we came to deeper parts, and sometimes needing to help each other climb up small waterfalls. There was only one place where we had to abandon this course, when we arrived at a waterfall about twenty feet high which could not be scaled. Using some ropes, though, we managed to climb the bank and get around it.
Our final destination was an even larger waterfall - perhaps 100 feet in height - with a nice large pool at the base. Water falling from that height has a lot of power, and no one actually sat under it for more than a few seconds. Here the Italians discovered to their chagrin that the cigarette lighter they had meticulously packed on multiple plastic bags no longer worked, and the way back would be smoke-free.
On our return, there were three places we had climbed up which we could not easily clamber back down, so we resorted to jumping down into the pools below. This was quite a rush, especially given how frigid the water was (probably mid-50's). When we got to the large waterfall we had had to rope around there was quite a queue as everyone prepared for the 20-foot drop. Most of the group, myself included, simply jumped straight out from the edge and landed feet-first into the basin below, but one intrepid fellow (a nuclear engineering student with the geeky glasses to match) did a backflip off the ledge above to the cheers of all.
On the way back to the highway Pedro was assigned to go in front to watch for poisonous snakes and signs of velociraptors (Jurassic Park was filmed nearby). We changed our soaked clothing and boarded the bus (I can't imagine what the driver thought of us) to make our way back to town.
All along our entire trip we saw no animals except the occasional water-strider and heard nothing except birds and cicadas (or whatever the equivalent is down here). It actually sounded exactly like what they pipe into zoos in the US.
On the way back we paused to each the lunches we had packed at a wayside rest stop. Here we actually met several local creatures including a recently dead jaguar, some enormous spiders, hummingbirds, and a "spider-monkey".
A local species of jaguar (the full size ones are about 6.5 feet long) - this is a small variety.
And that was that. The jungle was really incredible - I would have taken pictures save for the warning to leave everything in the bus (which was just as well since we were completely submerged in water many times). We ran across many colorful plants, various exotic vines and trees, and crystal clear running water.
Later in the afternoon we had a soccer game between in the Costa Rican residents at Miravalles (including myself) and the visitors which we won 5-3. The evening concluded with a cookoff between a charcoal and a gas grill to see who could cook the best beef strips and sausage (everything of course ending up wrapped in a tortilla).
This was the first day I did not spend working at Yorkin (my school) or Miravalles, and it was quite enjoyable.
