Corcovado

Corcovado sort of redeemed Costa Rica for us. We had been slightly unimpressed with certain parts of the country so far and Corcovado is painted as THE place to see wildlife along with a beautiful landscape, and it did not dissapoint. We woke up early in Puerto Jiminez to catch the early morning 4wd public transport out to Carate, from there it's a 4km walk along the beach into the park. The park is somewhat well known and there aren't many spaces available for camping, so all we could swing was 1 night at the Sirena ranger station, a 20km walk from Carate. Here is Rachel enjoying the bumpy ride out and a picture of the beach on the way to the park entry.










Corcovado was called ¨the most biologically intense place on earth¨ by National Geographic, and it quickly became apparent why. It seemed that every couple hundred feet we walked we saw a new insect, bird, animal or flower. In sections the beach was literally crawling with hermit crabs, by the thousands, a sheet of moving shells on top of the sand. Rachel said the sound of their legs reminded her of the sound pop rocks make in your mouth. These creepy spiders were also everywhere.











The hike was a flat 13 miles that went between beach and land, but there was so much to see along the way that it took us about 7 hours to walk to camp. Like coconuts full of hermit crabs and flowers.

Coatis and Tapirs (an odd sort of animal with a pig body, a flacid nose and elephant like eyes)

Cool trees

Spiky trees and soaring monkeys

Snakes (either a boa constrictor or the venomous pit viper) and beaches

Scarlet Macaws and forests

Whoo, this is a good example of a picture being worth a thousand words, or 160,000 words. Corcovado was AMAZING, nuff' said.

After we headed into Panama up into Boquette. It feels so nice to be back in the mountains, the heat on the Costa Rican coast was becoming unbearable. Yesterday we went up Volcan Baru, the highest and only volcano in Panama. The clouds actually cleared a bit and we had somewhat of a view, which I guess here is pretty rare. I´ll post pics when I´m able to upload them.