The Green machine!
If you think of Costa Rica you only think green nature, epic animals and volcano's! So that was where this trip is going to be about!
Our plane landed 7 o'clock in the evening so we decided to skip San José and book a hostel closer to the first part of the country that we would like to discover. The Hostel send us a cab and at the airport there was a guy wit our name sine :D that was the first time that we got picked up like that!
Guapiles!
The first stop was one to do a little acclimatizing! After a trip of approximately 24 hours that's what you want. A nice hostel run by a woman from the Netherlands! yes a little patriotic but hey, a hostel in the jungle beside a river where you can cool down a bit! Why not!
La Dante Salvaje!
The location was pretty good because it was close by the location where we started a three day trip trough the jungle! La Dante Salvaje! We where picked up at the hostel by a four wheel drive and drove for 2 hours up the mountain to the the starting point of our four hour hike up into the jungle, the warm and high humidity of the jungle was pretty heavy! In the beginning we came across a view little farms and there I encounter my first wild snake ever, a Fer-de-lance! to bad it was dead, probably killed by a farmer to protect his livestock. After some river crossings we entered the dense jungle of Costa Rica and the path way became more and more overgrown. Good that the guide has a machete to cut his way trough the dense bush! 2 and a half hour in to the hike there was the first open spot in the jungle, it was a little elevated and the guide told us that this was the helicopter emergency landing site for us if we needed to be rescued! Then i thought we would be close to the camp but that stil was one hour and a half away! Then I realized we had to be even more careful and not get bitten by a snake because we might not survive the trip to that landing zone!
Base camp!
Arriving at base camp was magical, a large wooden building on stilts made from the trees that had been cut down at that location! using only a chainsaw they sawed planks from the local trees with which they had built a two-storey building. Almost everything they had inside was made from local materials. Such as stones from the river for the fireplace and the kitchen. There was no electricity and the drinking water had to be carried in! They had a shower but that was a hose that ran from the cabin in to the waterfall 500 meters away from the camp. I took my towel and took a walk to the waterfall and just took a shower directly underneath it :D After a lazy afternoon we cooked dinner on a fire and eat it at candlelight. After a nice game of UNO we called it a night!
The waterfall!
The next morning we took a hike to a big waterfall. It was a round trip of 8 hours so we took off early! This trip was over a path that was so overgrown it took as more than that. The pat ran over a mountain ridge and was very narrow. In some places no more than 20 cm wide. At one point there was a tree on the pat that we had to climb around, but there was a hog nose viper sleeping on the other side of that tree! we even came across a Fer-de-lance lying in the middle of the trail. Then I realized that we had been on the road for 3 hours and that the helicopter site was now more than 5 hours away from where we where! A sweet reminder to take good care! The first stop was a little waterfall where we took a little swim to cool down and to eat breakfast, not long after that we saw the big waterfall for the first time and that gave us a nice boost to hike faster. The last part to the waterfall was very dangerous. Basically we just walked over fallen trees and branches. We didn't feel the ground again until we reached the rope where we could climb down.
The view from the top was amazing and the water was very refreshing! To bad i didn't own a drone back then! That would have been awesome footage!
After enjoying the view and a little lunch we got back to base camp where we arrived just before sunset. This was one of the best hikes i ever took. Probably also the most dangerous one! The next day the group took a hike down to the bottom of the waterfall! I stayed at the camp because of an old back injury and i wanted to take pictures of the animals around the camp!
If you are planning to go to Costa Rica i highly recommend this trip! After the last night we hiked back to the hostel where we left the biggest part of our luggage! There we washed our cloths and i took a fine cold beer :D
