Walk on Water

Posted by: Laura & Chris

Laura: When Chris lived in California, his football Sunday routine consisted of waking up at 9:30 am and dragging his big, fuzzy blanket downstairs to the huge projector screen TV, where he would consecutively watch three games of football. His roommate, Karen, would return to their house after a day of hiking, riding horses, or hanging out at the beach to find Chris still in his pajamas watching TV. She loved to make fun of him for missing the beautiful California weather.

Our second stop in Panama was a group of jungle covered islands called Bocas del Toro. After our intense jungle hiking, we needed a day to relax. We stayed on the smaller, less crowded island, Bastimentos. Our hostel was built on a pier, so that you could actually see the water through the floor of our room. A few hammocks hung at the end of the pier covered by a thatched roof. The German couple who owned the hostel cooked excellent food, so we didn´t need to go anywhere else. The beaches looked nice, but the sand flies and strong currents helped us to decide to relax at the hostel. Because our island had no paved roads and because I promised Chris´dad I wouldn´t go running through the jungle by myself, I took a water taxi to the larger island of Bocas to go for a run. When I got back, the woman who owned the hostel informed me that Chris had not moved from the hammock on the pier the entire day, except to occassionally check his email.

Chris: We did go and check out Wizard beach while we were there, but the mood was a bit sour. The day before a young female backpacker went swimming in the waves, and by the time their friends found her it was too late. She got pulled out too deep and drowned. A Canadian couple we befriended back in Corcovado got to the island the day before us, and unfortunately were there with the body for 5 hours until a local boat finally came. While I enjoyed the cheap lobster dinner and hearing about their last day in the jungle(when we last saw them), this news was a bit disheartening. Not a happy story, but one of those reminders that when locals or your guidebook seriously warn you about safety, listen to them.

A couple days before Bocas del Toro, where I thoroughly enjoyed laying all day in the hammock playing my guitar, we stopped at a cool mountain of Boquete. We took the ”map” our whacked out hostel owner drew me(between obsessively rubbing his face and laughing maniacally), but tossed it in the garbage. We had some of the best coffee not grown in Guatemala, and happened upon an open Garden house. Not sure what it was there for, but we freely walked in the backyard among brightly colored flowers and running streams. The climate is near perfect, and almost everyone has flowers in their yard, and fresh fruit.

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Laura: You can´t go to Panama without visiting the Panama Canal, so we headed to Panama City. The canal is am impressive series of locks about 50 miles long. We visited Miraflores Lock where we watched a cargo ship and a passerger ship pass through. However, be warned that watching a ship go through the system of locks can be somewhat anticlimatic, as it takes each ship about 8 hours to get from one side of the canal to the other. Most ships are built to the dimensions of the canal which is only 33 meters wide and 300 meters long.

While visiting the City Park, we walked up to a lookout point for a panoramic view of the city. On our way back down, we passed a pond full of turtles. As we walked by, we startled a lizard, which ran across the water. We realized we had found a group of Jesus Christ Lizards, named for their ability to ¨walk¨on water, or run very quickly using the surface tension of their legs and tail.

Next flight out is for Peru in South America.

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Things That Go Bump in the Night

Posted by: Laura and Chris

Laura: I specifically asked if the tent came with a tarp when we rented it that morning in Puerto Jiménez that morning. Yet there we were in the middle of the Costa Rican RAINforest setting up a tent with no tarp. It didn´t make me feel any better that it was the dry season. It had rained once every day the past three days we had been on the Osa Peninsula. But we had just hiked 9.3 miles through the jungle, so we didn´t really have much of a choice.

If you´ve ever been camping with me, you would know that you recieve a packing checklist, an itenerary of the miles we will hike each day, the trails we will take, and the sites where we will camp. I have even reserved camp spots 6 months in advance. (I realize this is type of organization contrasts how I live the rest of my life).

However with a population of only 3000, the town of Puerto Jimínez did not provide all the supplies we needed to camp in the jungle for three days. For example, no one rented camp stoves or sold freeze dried camping food. The campsites where we could stay had no kitchen access, and camp fires were not allowed. So we bought canned tuna fish, Pork n Beans, peanut butter, and Snicker´s bars. If you have never been camping, no one takes canned food camping. Next time you go grocery shopping, put all your cans in a bag and carry them around for a while, you´ll figure out why freeze dried food is an amazing invention.

The camp site, situated next to the ranger station, did have a covered area with a picnic table and benches. We decided our neighboors wouldn´t mind if we set up our tent under the communal area since we didn´t have a tarp (and they didn´t speak English).

About an hour after we had gone to bed, I heard something walking next to our tent, to be more exact, I heard something pacing back and forth about five feet from our tent. Of course I asked Chris to go check out the noise. When he peered out of the tent into the dense foilage of the jungle, he saw a pair of eyes looking back. Then the flashlight died. So there we were in the middle of the jungle with canned food and no can opener, a tent but no tarp, a flashlight with a dead battery, and a pair of eyes staring at us.

We unanimously decided to move the tent. I would rather be rained on than eaten. I jiggled the flashlight batteries and figured we had a few more seconds of light. I shined it on the spot where the eyes had been and watched them move away.

Chris: ”Unanimous” is a relative word. I’d already had my pack stolen by a Bear in Yosemite and didn´t care for a repeat. A little later I tried to sneak back out with the faulty flashlight and see if I could catch another glimpse, but the moment had passed. The Jungle at night produces some crazy noises. There was a moment out there while totally alone, unable to see 5 ft in front of me, surrounded my blackness and dense Jungle, and aware that something was watching me, that I felt for the 1st and only time in my life what it feels like to be prey. Nothing was gonna eat me, so far there haven’t been any reported Jaguar or Puma killings of humans in the park. But it´s a hell of a feeling to be that blind and vulnerable, and so I did finally give it up and returned to the tent where I sweated for a few hours(Jungle+poorly ventilated tent=miserable sleeping).

Laura: The next day we continued our hike through the thickest part of the jungle. We walked for 11 miles and saw almost a hundred monkeys. Three different types of monkeys: Howler monkeys, Squirrel Monkeys, and Spider Monkeys. We saw a group of coati, a small animal that looks like a racoon, but has the tail of a lemur. Everyone else on the trail were Grad school students who kept asking us, ”Are you studying here very long?” When we explained that we were just on vacation, we got the same response every time: ”Wow, pretty off the beaten track for a vacation.”

Chris: At times the jungle was so thick that we couldn´t see thirty feet into it. That night in our campsite, Laura woke up again to another noise, and had me investigate. Pretty much the standard practice with us it seems. Again I argued it was nothing, finally pointed the flashlight, and saw an endangered tapir. Laura gasped, ”It´s a Hippopatamus!” And while Hippo´s don´t exist on this Continent it did make for a running joke on the trip.

The last day we were on the trail by 5:07am(Laura doesn´t mess around with the clock thing), the sun just starting to creep up. We had to cross a section 2 hours before low tide or else we´d get stuck, so we booked it along the beach for 2 hours. It´s a pretty amazing thing when dense jungle meets the Pacific Ocean. Walking pre-sunrise and alone–except for the random howling noises from within the Jungle, and the cat paw prints in the sand–we thought ”yea, this is the real deal.” More monkeys, and mammals, and birds that day as we moved from gorgeous beach to jungle, sometimes missing the trail markers along the way which is easy when the trails aren´t actually marked. Macaws are LOUD, but beautiful when flying.

The other thing about the Jungle besides the big animals, are the big bugs. Leaf cutter ants lined the trails most the way and their mounds sometimes sprawled for over 10 meters. Another species of ants live on specific trees and agressively defend their home. They bite you, then turn around and sting the wound. Both of us almost walked face first into these freaky green spiders with heads that looked like skulls. The size of their webs were horrifying. Saw a beautiful blue dragonfly the size of my head staring at me from about 2 feet away from my face, seemingly saying ”What the hell are you doing here?” At one point Laura pointed and said ”Look at the pretty bird,” and I had to explain to her ”That’s wasn’t a bird, that was a butterfly.”

It was an ardous day though. Carrying packs for miles across looslely packed sand in that heat was intense, and the longer we walked the less pretty it became. By the end of the trek we were totally spent, had to rest 30 minutes at La Leona ranger station before the final 1 hour beach walk. The $2 cokes waiting at the end was well worth it.

We realize that by not being impressed with Costa Rica pretty much offends every Milsaps grad and summer exchange student who thinks it´s the coolest place on earth and laments about their National soccer team. It´s not that it’s not cool in parts, just that it’s: expensive, packed with Americans, and overhyped. You can see everything Costa Rica offers in Panama, Mexico, and the other C. America countries. This website has a pretty spot on explanation. BUT, there are incredible things to see, and Corcovado tops that list. It was a tough hike, probably the toughest we´ve ever done considering the weight of our packs, lack of any kind of map, heat, muddy trails, loose sand, etc. 32 miles over 3 days, and in retrospect it can be done much easier if you come prepared. But it was every bit worth it, and we saw more wildlife there than in the whole of Central America. Imagine being in a zoo, except the cages are open and the animals are staring at you.

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Monkey See, Monkey Do

Posted by: Laura

I´ve always found it interesting to watch the herd instinct of people. Almost every person walking down the street will stop near a big group of people simply to see what everyone is looking at.

As an Art History teacher, I have thousands of images of famous paintings, sculptures, and architecture. I have spent hours on line collecting the best examples I can find. (Don´t worry this is completely legal). When I visit an art museum, I generally take pictures of lesser known works of art, that just happen to catch my eye. I´ve noticed a trend that whenever I stop to take a picture of a work of art, other people will gather around. Assuming that this painting has some significance (other than the fact that I like it), they will take a picture of the same painting.

Today, we took a two hour bus ride to visit Volcan Poás, an active volcano north of San Jose, Costa Rica. However, after we had paid the park entrance and walked to the lookout point, we saw nothing but fog. We could only see about 50 meters in front of us. We had four hours to amuse ourselves as we waited for the fog to clear, so here´s the game I made up:

You walk along one of the trails and start pointing at the trees and pull your camera out. Immediately other people will rush over. You exclaim in a loud whisper. “I think I just saw a monkey.” Then more people come over. Each person takes turns doing this, You have to count the number of people who have stopped to look. The person who can gather the largest crowd wins.

So far, we have been unimpressed with Costa Rica.  Basically, it”s like Florida without the pretty beaches.  We have heard amazing things about Corcovado National Park, so we are adding a three day camping trip into the jungle to our itinerary.

note: Chris´s mother told him if you don´t have anything nice to say, don´t say anything at all. Thus, he has not contributed to this post.

Costa Rica, Take 1

Posted by: Laura

If you need to hire a marketing firm, I recommend the one that advertises for the country of Costa Rica.  I have seen countless TV adds which show amazing beaches and exotic wildlife. Our guidebook described Playa Tamarindo as having “pristine beaches” and “a great beach town for backpackers.” From this description, I was expecting white sand, palm trees, and buget options for lodging and food.

When we arrived, we found a short stretch of beach patrolled by people trying to sell you package tours and transportation for $200 to Monteverde (another popular mountain town which cost us about $12 by bus).  It had rained the night before so the dirt roads had turned to mud and added a putrid smell to the whole town.  The cheapest hostel we could find was twice as much as we had been paying.  A meal at Subway cost us $14.

Not to be deterred, we decided to visit the town of Monteverde and walk through the cloud forest. We were able to find cheaper places to stay here, and the forest was nice, but nothing spectacular. We did however visit the Butterfly Garden where a fabulous tour guide showed us leaf bugs, leaf cutter ants, spiders, hummingbirds, and of course hundreds of butterflies.

We will head to San Jose to check out Volcan Poas, a huge volcano two hours north of the capital.

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Isla de Ometepe

Posted by: Laura

I had only been running for ten minutes. My route began at our hotel, located directly on the shores of Lake Nicaragua.  As I ran down the narrow strip of beach, I carefully dodged two “attack” geese guarding their egg that lay under a nearby tree. I had watched them chase off anyone who dared to trespass on their section of beach, especially small children. I then turned onto a wooded dirt trail that led me inland and past a lagoon, then up a small peninsula that jutted out of the southern part of the island. As the trail rose, I admired the view of the lake below me in the afternoon sun. The lake is so large that I kept forgetting it was a lake and not the ocean. Some of the fish had forgotten this too because when the lake was attached to the ocean by a stream, some of them swam up the stream and adapted to the freshwater habitat. This is the only freshwater lake in the world with sharks. Which is why I decided to go for a run, instead of a swim.

I suddenly saw two howler monkeys sitting on the trail twenty feet in front of me. We stared at each other, neither of us wanting to make the first move. I had never been so close to a wild monkey before. They slowly retreated, climbing into the mangrove trees on the side of the trail. I looked into the tree which is about my height and saw about 8 more monkeys, including one baby clinging to its mother´s back.

I watched them for a few minutes, then continued on my run. About 10 minutes later, running along the dirt trail on the other side of the lagoon, I startled a group of five white cranes, which I stopped to watch as they took flight.

As I was about to run another loop, I found Chris on the beach taking pictures and decided it was more important to show him the monkeys than finish my run. Chris hurried up the trail in his flip flops. We found the monkeys in the same spot, but they had climbed a little higher into the trees. They watched Chris take their pictures with cautious disintrest.  We sat and watched them for about twenty minutes.

As the sun was about to set, we hiked to another lookout point, Mirador Diablo (Devil´s Lookout), to get a good view of the volcano, which sits in the middle of the island. We saw more monkeys as we hiked up the steep trail to the lookout point. The only thing we didn´t get pictures of were the vampire bats that lived on the porch outside of our room.  Every night we walked in and out of the room, we would see them hanging updside down above our heads before darting off. 

All the pictures were taken in less than 2 hours time: all the animals, beach, trail, and sunset pics, which goes to show both the diversity of the Island and the ease with which you can see everything. 

After visiting the somewhat run down town of Leon, the much nicer colonial town of Granada, and the higlight of Nicaragua–Isla de Ometepe– we´re heading to Costa Rica.

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As the Crow Flies

Posted by: Laura

A crow flies in a straight line, without concern for the terrain. If you look at our map, you will see a perfectly straight line stretching from Perquín, El Salvador to Leon, Granada. However, this is not how we travel.

A few times per country, we get to take direct buses to our destination. Most of the time we have to change buses a few times. Sometimes we have had to take up to six buses in one day to get where we are going. These are not good days.

Our epic journey from El Salvador to Nicaragua began at 7:45 in the morning as we were waiting for a covered truck to come pick us up. Traveling in the back of a truck is not as fun as it was when you were a little kid and begged your parents to let you ride in the back of the pickup instead of the cab. While they have put benches in the back of the trucks and added a covered tarp, the idea is to see how many people can fit in the back. There´s strategy to this mode of transportation. You don´t want to be the first ones on because you get squished in the back with no air. But you don´t want to be the last one on because you have to hang out the back holding on to a rail. Why do we travel in such style, you ask. Because it only costs 25 cents for an hour ride.

So we took a covered truck from Perquín, El Salvador to San Francisco Gotera, so we could catch the bus to the boarder of Honduras, where we could get a shuttle across Honduras, cross the boarder into Nicaragua, then take another bus to our destination of Leon, Nicaragua. Sounds simple enough, yet our bus connections never seem to work out in a timely or efficient manner.

I haven´t actually seen a bus schedule posted anywhere since Mexico. So once we got to San Francisco Gotera, we had to ask which bus would get us to the boarder. Chris has decided it´s more efficient for me to ask for directions. I can´t argue with his logic because within 5 seconds, I had three policemen helping me figure out which bus I needed. I was trying to ask the policemen if we had to backtrack to the larger city of San Miguel in order to get to the border, or if we could catch a bus from the town we were in. They told us to catch bus 18. The town doesn´t have a bus station, all the buses just drive through the main street and you flag it down if you want to hop on. So we sat down on the curb to wait. After 30 minutes the policemen came over to tell us that we had missed the bus, but another one would come. Apparently, we did have to go back to San Miguel (two hours out of our way). After waiting for the next bus, we arrived back in San Miguel and found the bus to the Honduran boarder, another hour and a half away. Only, when the bus driver called last stop, we weren´t at the border. We got dropped us off in the middle of nowhere, and we had to get on a different bus to drive us the remaining 30 minutes to the border. If you´re confused at this point, we were too.

Most buses don´t actually cross the borders. Unlike the simple European border crossing where the efficient guards collect your passports and then promptly return them without you ever having to leave the comfort of your train cabin, these buses unceremoniously dump you off at a dusty stop where you have to make your way through a mob of people grabbing at you and trying to sell you food, drink, change your money, all at a “good price for you.”

Once we reached the Honduran border, we walked to immigration, then found a shuttle to take us to the other side of Honduras so we could cross into Nicaragua. Since we were crossing the Southern part of Honduras, it was supposed to take 2 hours. But for some reason, our van got pulled over at each of the three checkpoints we crossed. However, Chris and I were the only ones whose bags were searched. The nice guard with the semiautomatic weapon looked at our passports for a full minute before he gave them back. I guess he was wondering what we were doing there. I was wondering the same thing. At that point, it occurred to me that we had not seen another backpacker for the past three days.

We finally made it to the border where once again we were dumped out and swarmed by vendors. We discovered that it was a 1 kilometer walk to the bus station once we crossed into Nicaragua. For those of you wearing sweaters, please keep in mind that it´s summer down here, and Honduras is humid. Once we walked to the next town, we found that the “bus station” was actually one bus waiting in the middle of a patch of dirt near some cinder-block houses. We also found out we had two hours to wait before the bus left. After pouring sweat for the past 6 hours, Chris thought it wouldn´t make a difference to run around a bit because when I looked over, he was playing soccer with a group of local kids. Most of them were half his size, and some of them were playing in bare feet for flip flops, but they were all pretty good. We finally got on the last bus, a four hour ride, which got us to Leon, Nicaragua about 10pm. We decided to take a taxi to find a hostel. We chose a cheap but well rated hostel from our guide book, told the taxi driver the address, checked out the room, paid, threw our bags down, only to discover that the hostel had no running water.

In total, we took 7 modes of transportation(1 truck, 5 buses, and 1 taxi), walked through 3 borders (El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua), and spent 15 hours in transit. I envy the crow.