• Day 053: Wednesday February 22nd

22:00 We decided today to take an extra trail – Sendero Sirena, before heading out of the park just so we had covered a little bit more of the park.  Again the cayman was out enjoying the surf catching and thrashing almost out of the water with fish, which was a great spectacle to witness.  We also then spotted a Bull Shark from a distance though it didn’t really do too much just a dorsal fin bobbing about in the water, though we hung around for around 20 minutes or so.  I believe that people have lied about seeing an American Crocodile, especially seeming as various guides have said they haven’t heard of one being seen for at least 4 years, silly tourists making up stories!

Then a failed attempt was made to cross the now actually pretty extensive river at the beach as it appeared doable from afar but it turned out there was no chance.  Therefore we continued as before upriver to a somewhat rocky crossing area onto a trail though this time the German guy took the tent back, as we eventually agreed that seeming as I carried it the whole way in he should help by carrying it out and thus making it more or less fair.  The returning walk back in the sun made it 10 times as difficult as the walk out, much much harder – top tip: leave very early to miss as much sun behind the rocky outcrops/peninsulas as possible!

Supporting The Tree (D.Philpot)

Brown Forest Snake? (D.Philpot)

Path Into Trees (D.Philpot)

Along the way back we saw a couple of Brown Forest Snakes, got some more red Macaw photos on a beach and we quite literally met a Coati walking the opposite direction along a long beach.  Somehow we then took a different trail and ‘lost’ the giant shipwrecked engine that we had passed on the way out, so we became a little disorientated but knew we were on track and couldn’t go wrong and continued to push on.  For some reason we decided to run the last 2 km or so, which was thrilling to say the least, and was very hard but a good adrenaline rush. I also found a Tapir footprint on the beach as seen below:

Tapir Footprint (D.Philpot)

Hugging The Trees (D.Philpot)

Interesting Rocks (D.Philpot) 

The German guy was very hungry at this point, he changes to another person which is vastly entertaining for others to see and when we were near Carate he consumed many coconuts as he didn’t want to buy any food or drink from the “***hole” guy that ran the shop.  So there we sat in Carate for about 2.5 hrs for the bus feeling pretty thirsty but not thinking about it, no cheap planes came in either L I spent this time sat reflecting on our somewhat crazy Corcovado experience and had the nice blue waves on my mind at this time. There were then 2 more German kids that we got to know en-route to Puerto Jimenez, and on this final horrific bus journey we saw some Toucans in a tree but quite far away which was cool.  

This evening we ate out in Restaurant Carolina with these other Germans and their friends, who funnily enough were getting the same flight back to Germany as my friend which was strange.  After the meal I said goodbye, the German guy said goodbye for now, and we went back to the host family of Fanny Lu’s.

We had both had an incredible experience we will never forget.

Absolute Maximum Carrying Capacity (D.Philpot)