Central America

This area is insane. It is honestly like a scene from the TV series, Lost - if you can handle the back breaking boat journey to get there, that is.

Corcovado National Park occupies 40% of the Oso Peninsula and is hugely biodeverse making it home to half of Costa Rica's species. There was a time that people inhabited this area but in 1975 it was declared a national park and therefore these residents had to move elsewhere. Today it is dense forest, although the area we walked in was of course secondary forest so not so thick and the trees weren't as high as other places we have been.

We had a 5:30am wake up call in order to leave the lodge by 5:45am to follow our host Lucy down to the beach (who said travelling was easy or relaxing?!). There we met with our guide for the day, Alberto and picked up our surprisingly large packed lunches. Where was all this food for Acatenango? These days it's mandatory to have a guide to visit Corcovado, presumably partly due to its immense size, a somewhat lack of marked trails and also to protect the park and its wildlife. Although it was a bit of a sting on the old budget, the plus side of having a guide is that they are able to tell you about the animals you see and they're more likely to know where to look to find them in the first place, not to mention that they usually carry around a telescope which makes it possible to get a decent view of said animals, especially when they're often far away or hidden amongst the trees.

Drake Bay sits on the outskirts of the park so a boat trip was required to get us to the Sirena Ranger station, the area of the park where we were going to be walking. With no jetties in sight, the boats can only do wet landings at the beach so it was a barefoot affair as we clambered onto the boat with some companions for the day. And so began a one and a half hour boat journey that would liken to riding a camel at speed. Huge swells made for a bumpy and uncomfortable ride, definitely stirred up my old back injury yet again and probably gave everyone else a new one. It wasn't all bad though, we had stunning views of the coast and the jungle, not to mention an insane amount of deserted beaches. Backs and bums having definitely seen better days, we finally reached the bay we were after. Some decent surf (at least 2-3metres) provided a slightly hairy entrance but clearly it wasn't the driver's first rodeo as he manoeuvred the boat to surf the waves in so we made it to shore safely. Another wet dismount onto the beach meant we were battling with sandy feet to then put socks and shoes on top of to walk with for the day. Joy! After a quick sign-in at the tourist office which was really just a couple of sticks and a tarpaulin, we were on our way.

Within ten minutes of walking we had already seen numerous animals - coatis, spider monkeys, howler monkeys, some ground based birds I can't remember the name of and one of the largest grasshoppers I've ever seen, literally the length of my hand or possibly even longer. The morning continued with the guide helping us find all sorts of animals including a sloth and it's baby (so adorable) as well as the well camouflaged red eyed tree frog, which is brightly coloured red, blue and orange underneath but when sleeping as we saw it, you can only see bright green.

While we've seen many animals now multiple times in some of the other national parks in Costa Rica, it is still interesting to go to different parks because we've had different experiences with the animals at each park. For Corcovado one of the highlight was watching a big group of spider monkeys having a fight in one of the trees and making an almighty racket. At one point one of the monkeys fell or was thrown by one of the others, a decent distance out of the tree to the point where our guide had to go and make sure he hadn't died or was lying hurt on the forest floor. Unable to spot him, we carried on with the assumption that it just looked worse from afar and the monkey was ok.

Crossing a couple of streams, we found a Cayman which is like a small crocodile, lurking with its head above water. Even though they're much smaller they still manage to look menacing. A little walk longer and we reached a river mouth where we stopped to have an early lunch whilst birds circled overhead and loads of tiny crabs all with unique shells scrambled on the sand underfoot.

After lunch we continued on our mission to find the elusive Baird's Tapir, the largest mammal in Central America and one of the animals we hadn't managed to see in Costa Rica yet. Unfortunately they're endangered which obviously makes them a little harder to find, but Corcovado was going to be our best bet. During our hunt we found some squirrel monkeys, also endangered and only found in a small area of Costa Rica. We saw one of these in Manuel Antonio bouncing in the trees by the beach but this time there were two just resting in the trees which supposedly is not common to see as they're usually busy bodies as their name would suggest. Our guide strayed off the path a few times to check by streams and rivers as tapirs can swim and also will go to water to drink. Still no luck. We'd mostly given up on the chance of seeing these creatures when suddenly we stumbled across a mother and baby sleeping not far off the one of the paths.

The guide took us quietly closer to we could each get a better look one at a time and have the opportunity to take photos. The tapirs were much bigger than I expected, I'm not sure why I had in my head that they were like the size of small pig. They're bigger than a large pig but smaller than a rhino or hippo. Supposedly their closest relatives are actually rhinos and horses. After a few minutes of us being there, the baby got up and started walking away and calling to the mother. They have a very strange call, almost like a high pitched squeal which really doesn't match what they look like. Tapirs have bad eyesight so they rely mainly on hearing and smell to find each other and find their way around. It turned out the baby had sensed another male tapir coming. Normally tapirs are solitary animals aside from mother and babies so sometimes the males attack the babies but in this case he just ended up settling down to sleep near them. This is usually the only time you see more than one together.

Everyone was happy that we'd managed to spot the tapirs when we'd almost given up and we continued our way back to the boat on a slightly different route, when suddenly Alberto was shouting "snake!". Again this was the first we'd seen in Costa Rica, but blink and you'd easily miss it. This one was a tiger rat snake which moved very quickly in the leaves on the forest floor but we managed to catch a couple of glimpses of it before it slithered away. Our weird streak of finding animals we hadn't seen before continued with an anteater who bounded across the path in front of the guide and Mike who were at the front of the group, before proceeding to jump up and climb a tree. Such bizarre looking creatures they are.

Our boat was waiting for us when we got back to the beach and so followed another sketchy exit from the bay through big surf which had us hanging on for dear life when it almost tipped us out a couple of times. Against the odds we were back at Drake Bay by early afternoon which gave us time to hit the beach and have a swim and a bodysurf at what is basically a deserted stretch of beach.

The four of us hit a bit of a wall about where in Costa Rica to head to next. The idea of climbing Chirripo the highest peak in the country, was thrown around but it was by no means a small adventure and would have taken the best part of two days which none of us were really sure we were up to. With not much else we wanted to see or do in the middle of Costa Rica, we decided instead of wasting a couple of days just to break up the travel it was best to take the hit for one day and take the 10 hour journey over to Puerto Viejo, a beach town on the Caribbean Coast.

Bring on the cabin fever.Read more