Hiking Mount Chirripó

Costa Rica is a mountainous country – you just about can’t escape them here, even at the beach.  But the highest mountain (not just in Costa Rica but in all of Central America outside Guatemala) is called Mount Chirripó, at 3819 meters, several hours south of the Central Valley, which itself is about 1200 meters.  So naturally Caroline and I decided to hike it!  So Thursday after Caroline’s class, we hopped on a quick bus to San José, then hopped on another bus south to Pérez Zeledón (sounds like somewhere out of Lord of the Rings, verdad?), then took a four wheel drive taxi 45 minutes (mostly on gravel roads) to the tiny mountain town of San Gerardo de Rivas, which is the base camp for Mount Chirripó.  The final two kilometers to our hostel was about the worst roads I’ve ever seen in my life, AND at an incline of what felt like 45 degrees.  Let’s just say we now understand why four-wheel drive is a requirement.  The hostel’s name is Casa Mariposa, opened by an American couple as sort of an eco-hostel, and it’s the farthest from town but the closest to the trailhead to Chirripó.  We stayed in the 2-bed “Jungle room,” which feels like a tree house because instead of a wall, one side just has a huge screen!  One of the most sustainable parts of the hostel is its solid waste policy – the regional landfill closed, so they’re recycling and compost fanatics, and what’s left (like granola bar wrappers), they wash and densely stuff into 3-liter soda bottles, which they use as a construction material buried in the concrete when they build new structures.  Zero-waste - pretty cool, huh?

in the Secret Gardens

Anyways, the next day we had to wake up super-early.  I’ll spare you all the details, but basically to avoid over-crowding in the national park, they strictly limit the number of tickets per day to hike to Chirripó, and you have to buy the tickets the day before you hike.  Since the hike is so popular, the lines start several hours before the park office opens at 6:30, so we got up at 4AM to go get in line, and when we arrived, there were already five people in line!  Turns out the park only had seven tickets available that day, and we were #6 and #7!  Phew!  We felt bad for the dozen people in line after us, some of whom we had enjoyed talking to, who were just out of luck when the park ranger cut off the line after us…  But since we weren’t going to start hiking until Saturday, we had a full day to just chill out in San Gerardo de Rivas.  We started  by walking around in the Secret Gardens, with trails among beautiful flora and a treehouse with a gorgeous view of the surrounding mountains, and then ate breakfast at the house of and with the kind family that maintains the gardens.  After the long walk up the road to our hostel for a nap (funny sleeping patterns characterized the whole weekend) and then back down into town, we ended up at the house of a lady named Amable (and sure enough, she was very amable – friendly), who in her backyard has stream-fed trout ponds, and we each caught a nice trout for lunch (pictures below)!  Caroline seemed to really enjoy it until she got sad about the whole killing-the-poor-fish part… From hook to fryer in less than 5 minutes!  In the afternoon we did some moderate hiking to some nearby waterfalls just before sunset.  We also had lots of work to do – we had to plan and purchase all of our food for the next 36 hours, as well as rent a camping stove to cook it.  Luckily for us, we were staying in such a great hostel that they had bought lots of fresh local organic produce and had it out for sale at cost, so we snatched up a lot of that and some eggs for dinner, as well as lots of granola bars and peanut butter sandwiches…  And luckily for me, Caroline is a world-class packer and happens to own a first class backpacking backpack, and I still don’t know how she did it, but she managed to pack in her bag lots of clothes (it gets very cold at the top), all of our food, and not one but TWO sleeping bags.  Amazing.  Then finally bed time :)

Step 1: Catch fish

Step 2: Feel bad for the poor little fish.

Step 3: Clean fish

Step 4: Hand clean fish to the cook

Step 5: throw dem thangz in da deep fryer!

Step 6: Add some organic homegrown veggies and french fries and eat!

Cloud forest

in Cloudbridge Reserve

Expert

Without flash

With flash

during sunrise

Saturday morning we woke up around 4:30 to start hiking the 15 kilometers to the base camp where we would be spending the night.  Before we set out, I pulled a David-Allen-in-the-middle-of-a-track-event and drank too much water, so Caroline carried the pack for most of the first several kilometers.  Our body schedules by this point were quite messed up – at one point it felt to me like the sun had been up for hours and surely it was lunchtime, but when I checked the time it was only 8AM!  A trend that would continue… We made it to the shelter at the 7.5K mark in a couple hours and we were feeling great!  My how things would change… After the shelter, the next two kilometers felt interminable and straight up.  I mean we would walk for two minutes and take a break for two minutes.  And it didn’t help that right about that time, due to the altitude, we emerged from the tropical cloud forest into the treeless and shrubby paramo, so our shade disappeared.  Kilometer eight took so long we thought we must have missed the sign!  Took a heavenly lunch break around kilometer 11 with some new friends (the seven of us who got tickets bonded and took turns walking by ourselves and with each other depending on the timing of our breaks) and felt better after that, which was a good thing because next came “La Cuesta de los Arrepentidos” (Slope of the Repentants), another steep climb but soon followed by the long overdue site of the hostel!  After dropping our stuff off in one of the 4-bunk-bed rooms, we very much enjoyed just sitting down in the shade with our two new Canadian friends for a while before cooking dinner.  There is a cool rock formation on a mountain right across from the hostel, and it was very discouraging to look up at it and realize we had to climb even higher… After lots of chopping (and sampling – best tomatoes and spinach I’ve ever tasted in my life), we finally cooked everything together into scrambled eggs with veggies and salt (I was CRAVING salt/ electrolytes after all that exertion) and man was it good!  And then, straight to bed at 6PM (Andy Belich, you won’t be surprised to know that I called top bunk, just like when we were co’s), using clothes for pillows and each of us bundled up in our sleeping bag because even in Costa Rica, it gets COLD at that high altitude at night.

Still feelin good at Km 6

Not feelin so good at Km 9

This is paramo - feels more like desert than mountains.

Woke up at 2:30 (yes, Dad, I already know that’s when Chinese people go to the dentist), put on even more clothes, and staggered out the door into the pitch dark 40-degree Fahreinheit morning.  We were in the middle of nowhere so the stars were gorgeous.  Again, first part wasn’t bad, but two hours later, the last part was so steep it was more like rock climbing than hiking.  But we finally made it to the summit at 5AM, just in time to catch the sunrise!  On a clear day, you can see both the Caribbean and the Pacific from Chirripó, but unfortunately that day it was cloudy, so our view was limited to the surrounding mountains and lakes, which were still beaufiful.  The summit was smaller than I had envisioned, just room for a sign, the flag of Costa Rica, a book to sign your name, and the seven of us.  Actually come to think of it, we would have been able to squeeze in a hot chocolate/ coffee machine (we were freezing), but I didn’t see one…  After like an hour, back down we went the 5K to the hostel, where we took a much-needed break before continuing our descent.  Although it presented its own challenges (worse for joints and toes), going down was so wonderful compared to going up – faster, easier, lighter backpack, and in better spirits.  Got to town around 3 o’clock in the afternoon after 12 straight hours and 27 km of hiking.  Celebrated with ice cream first and then two cold Imperials before eating dinner at 3:30PM, followed by three buses and a taxi back to Heredia.  So glad we did it, but never again!

Sunrise from the top

"That's right, we just hiked that"

Back to the forest

To celebrate, ice cream...

...and beer!

¡Hola Heredia!

Man, time flies in Costa Rica.  It’s hard to believe I’ve been in Heredia for more than a month now!  Week one: lived in a $16-a-night hotel while taking group Spanish classes with a retired man from Asheville who liked to talk more than anyone else I’ve ever known.  Weeks two and three: I’m not paying the language school to spend hours listening to another Gringo try to speak Spanish, so I took private lessons (fewer hours, same price, learned a whole lot more) from Jesús, a wonderful teacher who reminds me of a skinny jeans-wearing Joe Cherof.  And I finally got moved in with a family that Silvie, Caroline’s host mom, knows well. (picture below).   

from left, Doña Adela, her mother Socorro, and their Nicaraguan helper/ cook/ cleaner/ friend Payita.  I feel so lucky to be with them!

Week four:  A group of Davidson students came on a spring break mission to paint the walls at Hogar Escuela in Heredia (picture below), so I brought them in at the airport and helped them.  Week five: waiting on the bishop and/or Ryan to tell me when they need help, so looks like I have a few days off to blog, write postcards, figure out family travel plans, etc.

These walls were completely blank when we started!

Now for the adventure part.  For some reason (it seems to be very arbitrary depending on the customs agent you get and which side of the bed they woke up on that morning), when I arrived in Costa Rica, they only gave me a thirty day visa instead of the more typical ninety days.  Wasn’t a big problem, I just figured once I got to Heredia, I’d go to the immigration office and ask for an extension to ninety days, and then when my ninety days were close to being up, I would go to either Panama or Nicaragua for a day, and then upon reentry be issued a new ninety day visa that would last until my flight home.  But things change.  First, after experiencing in person the difficulty of all things visa-related, Caroline (everyone in her study abroad program is required to obtain a student visa), told me she didn’t think it was worth the hassle and the long hours just to try to get an extension.  Second, I did some calculations and realized that from the last weekend my visa was still valid (the coming weekend), it was only 88 days until my flight home, meaning that if I left and reentered Costa Rica and got a 90 day visa, that would be the end of all my visa worries.  So on Monday of my second week in Heredia, I decided it made the most sense to leave the country that weekend.  I had originally been leaning towards a beach resort in Panama, but after doing a lot of research, it became clear that going to Granada, Nicaragua was a better option in many ways.

I’ve learned something about myself from this trip: I LOVE researching and planning trips.  So I spent hours consulting Trip Advisor, Lonely Planet, my host family, Jesús, Google Maps, and internet travel forums in order to plan the best trip possible.  And here’s where the adventure started.  We decided to leave Thursday as soon as Caroline’s class was over, at 4.  The problem was that we weren’t sure whether or not we could make it to the bus station in San José by 5, when the direct bus left for Liberia, which was the last bus we could possibly take if we wanted to make it to our adventure/volcano hotel before it closed at ten.  I know an hour sounds like plenty of time to drive the six miles to San José, but the rush hour traffic here is ridiculous.  I had to take three taxis that morning to buy our bus tickets and pick up an official letter from the Episcopal church asking the immigration official to give me ninety days, and out of my three drivers, only two thought we could make it… So anyways, we had the taxi wait for us at the university, jumped in, and I offered him a ten dollar tip if we made it to the bus station before 5, which was AWESOME for the first three minutes – I think our driver thought maybe he’d get a better tip if he was showy about it, so he channeled his inner Lightning McQueen and passed everyone at 100 miles an hour on these little two lane roads in Heredia (100 is obviously an exaggeration), but after a while it wasn’t fun anymore because it made our heads and tummies hurt…   BUT it worked, and we got there in plenty of time to catch our double-decker bus.  Wolfed down dinner at the ten-minute bus stop break halfway through.  Made it to Liberia, the capital of the northwest province of Guanacaste, at 9:15, and immediately took a taxi with the second most talkative person I’ve ever met in my life, who told us all about Guanacaste and Granada, and we pulled up to our hotel, Hacienda Guachipelin, at 9:59… phew.  They had told me they would wait for us if we were late, but it’s a gated property and you never know in Costa Rica…

Celeste y Carolina

This hotel is right outside the national park of Rincón de la Vieja volcano, and is not just a hotel.  For more than a century, it’s been a cattle ranch (we decided to skip out on the 5AM cow-milking demonstration – it was udderly too early for us), and now it’s also the adventure center of Guanacaste province.  We purchased the $85 all-day adventure pass, so after a yummy breakfast buffet, the 20 or so tourists in our group set off riding horses.  It was Caroline’s first time on a horse and she loved it!  Her horse was named Celeste (a shade of blue) and was hesitant to walk through the several small rivers we crossed, while mine was named Canela (Cinnamon), and liked being at the front!  Because Celeste was slow and usually in the back, I would pull back on the reins to make Canela stop and wait for Celeste (and Caroline) to catch up, but as soon as I let off the reins, Canela would run right back to the front again, a slightly terrifying experience the first few times!  It took us 45 minutes to make it to the river, where we began a relaxing 5km tube ride.   

Caroline upside-down on the zipline

Then after a yummy lunch buffet, it was time for the canopy and canyon tour.  The first several ziplines weren’t really that different than the one at Camp Thunderbird, but the whole second half of the tour was in a sweet canyon formed by eons of  soft volcanic rock being eroded by the river.  We got to zip upside down, rappel, rock climb, Tarzan swing across the canyon, and walk across a suspension bridge staircase, all while enjoying the cool breeze and scenic river below.  Then we hiked to a waterfall in our free time before the shuttle for the volcanic hot springs.  The first step at the hot springs was to rub hot volcanic mud all over your body – it’s supposedly good for your skin (that's my secret if you were wondering).  After it dries, you have to immerse yourself in the COLD river to wash it off, and then you finally get to sink into the heavenly hot springs themselves.  It felt SO good after being so cold.  We decided to celebrate the winding down of a long day of fun with two Imperials, our first drink together (the legal drinking in Costa Rica is 18).  Then I just had the most delightful time on the shuttle back talking to several older French couples!  Just kidding, I just made stuff up that sounded French but didn’t understand a word; it was Caroline who was the star of the show, the one American who spoke French, and they couldn’t get enough of her…

Next day we were up early again on the road back to Liberia to catch a bus to Granada, Nicaragua.  Instead of trying to take a string of cheaper, shorter, local buses and trying to navigate the border crossing on our own, we decided to pay $27 each to take the luxury (meaning onboard bathroom) international bus, which speeds up the border process and means you don’t have to know what’s going on because they tell you what to do (or rather you can watch what everyone else does).  Good thing too because even with guidance, the border was the most chaotic thing I’ve ever seen; I cannot imagine trying to get through by yourself (Lonely Planet understates it when writing that going solo is for “more confident travelers”).  It was a constant stream of handing your passport and entry money to the bus employee (kind of a scary thought), getting off the bus, waiting for your passport, getting back on the bus, driving farther, getting back off the bus, putting your luggage on a table, waiting there for twenty minutes for the inspector to come by and tell you you’re good without so much as looking at your luggage, all the while declining dozens of solicitations to buy things.  It was just madness.  And to complete the story, I even got ripped off by the certified money changers, even though I had researched the exact exchange rate (it’s usually given in dollars to córdobas, the Nicaraguan currency) that day to avoid getting ripped off.  I walked up, told the two guys I wanted the exchange rate to be 23.5 córdobas, and then gave them 20 mil (thousand) colones.  So the dude whipped out a calculator and typed in 23.5 x 20 = 470, and handed me 470 córdobas.  Perfect.  Back to the bus.  And then I realized my mistake – I had asked for the dollar exchange rate but paid in colones, meaning they only gave me half of what I gave them, as 20 mil colones is 40 dollars!  Another stupid Gringo falling for a classic trick.  By then it was too late, but hey, at least I learned a lesson, and it just seemed to fit perfectly with the rest of the border crossing…

This is a just a random church we passed on our way out...

Now for Granada.  Easily the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen in my life.  First of all, all the buildings are painted fun colors.  So each street block is a different rainbow.  The churches are also gorgeous – I had read about of a few of the most beautiful cathedrals in Granada, and for a while I thought each new church we came to must be one of them, until I realized that all the churches look like that… It was so different than any city I’ve been in – in the rest of the cities down here, gates and fences are ubiquitous (just about every single building has them), as are buses and trucks (and diesel fumes), and crowds and people you might not want to be alone with in a dark alley.  In Granada, none of the above.  Well, that’s not 100% true, there was a crowd gathered in the central park Saturday night for an international poetry festival… Given Nicaragua’s legacy as Costa Rica’s poorer and more troubled northern neighbor, it was surprising to feel even safer there than in Costa Rica!

Oh Gioconda...

Anyways, some good plannin, some bad planning...  I knew we weren’t going to have much time there, so I tried to pick the absolute best for our one afternoon and evening.  Trip Advisor showed absolute rave reviews for a tour guide named Gioconda, who gives tours wearing a traditional Nicaraguan dress, and even sings traditional Nicaraguan songs!  So we booked her for a brief tour of Granada, but did not feel the “magic” others wrote of, and were embarrassed enough even without her singing!  Lesson learned – anything that draws stares and attention to the fact that you are obviously a tourist is not fun.  But we did get to eat lunch with her and sample traditional Nicaraguan food, including the vigorón, featuring fried pork rinds.  Did we like it?  Let’s just say we went with international food for dinner…  

Next we met up with tour guide Ramón and another couple from Wyoming for an afternoon/ sunset tour of Las Isletas (the islets).  Granada is right on the enormous Lake Nicaragua, only a few miles up the shoreline from Mombacho volcano, which created the 365 islands thousands of years ago with a huge blast!  Some of the islands feature the mansions of some of Nicaragua’s (and the world’s) wealthiest families, some are uninhabited, one has an 18^th century fort built to protect the city from pirates, but here were our favorites: 1) we got off at an island (well, a peninsula really, but it felt like an island) inhabited by natives, and one of the local ladies prepared fresh local coconuts for us to drink the coconut water.  The couple from Wyoming had brought rum specifically to mix with the coconut water and shared it with us, so we all had “cocos locos!” 2) There’s a small island with a population of four monkeys, who are very hungry and have even been known to jump on the tour boats to snag some food! 3) There were birds all over the place – we saw hundreds of egrets - but one island in particular was so full of them it looked like they were just growing on the trees.  4) MANGOS!  There were even more mangos than birds, so many that the locals don’t even bother to collect them all, so you can literally just pick dozens right of the ground and eat them – and we did!  Mmmmm.  At one point I joked about jumping to pick one off a branch 15 feet high, and Ramón said “I’ll get that for you,” picked up a rock, and first try nailed it right above the mango, making it fall so I could eat it!  Turns out baseball is king is Nicaragua and Ramón used to play…   

Beautiful.

And to top it all off, the beautiful sunset between Mombacho volcano and the city.  Wish we’d had more time in Granada!  But Sunday morning we had to wake up very early again to catch the bus back to San José.  Border was still a mess.  I was a little nervous about reentering and how many days they’d give me on my visa, but we picked a friendly-looking guy and he gave us both 90 days, no problem, not even looking at my letter from the church, nor requiring proof of onward travel from Caroline!  Phew, what a weekend!