Travel 2012: Costa Rica

I recently looked at the Day’s Edge Blog and noticed that Neil was responsible for almost every post since 2011. This level of contribution is bad, even for me! In the last six months I finished my PhD, made a few films, ran a successful kickstarter campaign, moved from Miami to New Jersey, and did some exciting traveling in between. In my next few posts I’m going to share photo essays from trips I made to Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Colorado. I’ll start with Costa Rica.

2011 was a hard year both professionally and personally and I wanted to take a vacation before buckling down and finishing up my dissertation. I’ve visited Costa Rica almost every year since I was ten, accumulating almost two full years in the country. Despite traveling to many of the country’s distant corners, I’m always drawn to a few special places during short visits. Two of my favorite places are Nosara, a now popular surfing destination on the Guanacaste peninsula, and Rincon de la Vieja, an active volcano in the northwest corner of the country.

I flew to Costa Rica with my girlfriend, Amanda. We had ten days in the country. Our plan was to surf for the first six days at Nosara and then climb to the top of Rincon de la Vieja and camp near the volcano’s crater. In Nosara, we found an incredible hostel/campground called The Tree house Gardens that was a few minutes walk from Guiones Beach (the most popular surfing beach near Nosara). There, we literally slept in a tree house for five nights.

Our sleeping situation consisted of a tiny room built in the branches of a large tree. This tree house was connected to the ground by a small steep spiral staircase. The room itself was only big enough for a bed that touched all four walls. When you open the door, you literally had to get onto the bed to enter the room – luggage could be slipped under the bed from the doorway only.

During these six days we surfed every morning just after sunrise. We relaxed, ate and napped in the afternoons, before returning to the water for sunset wave sessions. The Tree House Gardens has a communal outdoor kitchen with hammocks galore – perfect for waiting out the hot hours of the day. Almost every night, we’d make ourselves dinner then head out to the beach to make a fire in the sand, and let the Milky Way entertain us.

Five days later we packed up our gear and drove our rental car four hours north into the shadow of Rincon de la Vieja National Park. We arrived at the Park entrance around 4PM only to find out that camping on the volcano had been outlawed for more than a decade. In my desperation to camp at the peak, I threw them every seemingly convincing argument in my arsenal (most of which were lies). The guards were unimpressed with my strange mix of partially fabricated accolades. So, I did what had to be done. I bribed them. $20 later, Amanda and I were alone in Rincon de la Vieja National Park, hiking through a tropical dry forest as the sun was quickly setting.

The guard instructed us to park in the lower parking lot and hike around the main entrance. We were to follow the forest edge and stay out of sight until we arrived at the trailhead. Sneaking along the rim of a large field, I yelled at Amanda to “stop!” as she almost stepped on a huge Boa constrictor camouflaged in the dry leaf-litter (see if you can find it in the image below). Amazingly, when we hiked down the volcano a day later, the Boa was in the exact same location.

I’ve been to this volcano many times, but have only climbed to the top of it once. I didn’t remember how difficult (or long) the hike was. Within a few hours after starting, our headlamps were on and Amanda and I were hiking under the canopy in the dark. We could hear the wind howling though the canopy, which got lower the further we climbed.

3 ½ hours into our hike, we emerged from the forest into a landscape of steep hills and dense windswept shrubs. I shined my headlight ahead to illuminate a wooden sign that proposed two alternative routes to the summit. One route was 7km pointing up a steep series of eroded pathways. The other was 9km and directed us down into a valley where we could hear heavy moving water. Both routes warned “peligroso.” Unsure if we wanted to deal with crossing a mountain river in the dark, we chose the shorter route and continued moving upwards.

Using roots as hand- and footholds, we scrambled up muddy vertical gullies that had been eroded into the mountainside by years of rain runoff. Scrambling quickly turned to climbing as we entered the clouds. Vegetation quickly disappeared and was replaced with black volcanic gravel on a steep unprotected face. The wind was now blowing 30mph+ and we were in white-out conditions. All we could see of one another was the glow of our headlamps in the thick white darkness. The sweeping flog left a cold layer of water that blanketed our bodies. Soon enough, we were off trail, lost, and cold. The wind was so strong it was blowing us over. Yelling to hear one another through the wind, we decided to turn around, hike to the vegetation and set up a tent for the night.

Setting up the tent in this weather was not trivial. Before we could get the poles in, the tent body was almost swept away by the wind. There was no flat area to set up in so we placed the tent directly onto a patch of bushes and tied the tent down to nearby vegetation. Before I could secure the fly, a pole snapped and half the tent collapsed. By the time, we fixed the broken pole with twigs, and secured the fly, we were freezing. We huddled together in a double sleeping bag to warm up and fell asleep without dinner.

I woke up just before sunrise and went outside to see where we had camped and what we had been trying to climb the night before. Looking up, I could see we had veered way off of the trail and were hiking up a steep volcanic face with a 1000 ft drop not far to the left. Good thing we turned around. Our campsite, which seemed like a nightmare the night before, looked absolutely beautiful. I woke up Amanda and we enjoyed the sunrise overlooking the Guanacaste Peninsula.

Under a mostly clear sky, we packed up camp and continued hiking. In a couple of hours we made it to one of the two craters at the top of Rincon. This was the extinct Von Seebach Crater.

After walking the Von Seebach rim, we hiked across an immense gray valley to a huge gravel ridge that would take us to the active crater. Once atop the ridge, we dropped our bags so that we could hike across a second, much more narrow ridge that would take us to see the sulfur lake in the active crater. I took the following picture without realizing that just feet in front of me, was a rare venomous snake.

Bothreichis lateralis, the green palm viper is an arboreal viper found exclusively in densely vegetated habitats. Yet here was this conspicuous green viper in the middle of a field of volcanic gravel and boulders, more than 1000ft higher than it has ever been recorded. It must have been up there hunting the skinks that I’d seen scurrying between boulders. I was a much more excited about this find than Amanda, who humored me by letting me shoot an unnecessary amount of photos. Not wanting the snake to get into our luggage while we hiked to the crater, I picked it up with my tripod and displaced it far from the ridge.

Unfortunately, clouds obscured our view of the lake in the active crater, so we turned around and hiked back up the thin ridge to our backpacks. Amanda sat down next to her bag an took a sip from her water bottle before jumping to her feet, and in a panicked whisper yelped, “snaaake!” That palm viper had come back to our bags and was hissing and rattling its tail in an aggressive posture just a few feet from where Amanda had sat down. Tops of volcanoes are not good places to be bit by venomous snakes.

After recovering from this bizarre snake encounter, we began the long hike down the mountain. At the end of the day, with an hour of light left, we reached a fork in the trail – one way split towards the trailhead and another toward several waterfalls. One of these waterfalls is called El Cangrejo. El Cangrejo is a large waterfall flowing into an emerald basin. Just to the left of the waterfall, warm water flows into the basin from several hot springs. It’s truly an amazing place. When you get chilly in the waterfall and basin you can swim over to the hot springs and warm up.
The sign at the fork said 4.5km to El Cangrejo. We were tired, but decided to try to make it to the falls. Hiding our packs off-trail behind the buttresses of a large fig tree, we ran to El Cangejo, took a swim, and ran back just before the sun set.

As we hiked out of the park with our headlights on, a new set of guards intercepted and interrogated us. They brought us to the entrance and pay station where the man we bribed sat waiting with a frightened look on his face. Not wanting to give him up, we told the other guards that we simply hiked in without asking questions. Relieved that our little negotiation was still a secret, our guard friend convinced the others to let us pay the entrance fee and leave. We apologized, happily paid the entrance fee and drove off.

That night, our last night in Costa Rica, we stayed at a small hotel near the smaller Playa Hermosa in northern Guanacaste. For the second night in a row, we fell asleep before dinner, exhausted from the trip. I left Costa Rica ready to write what was left of my dissertation.