This was the day we left civilization behind and entered the rain forest. We awoke early for a quality breakfast with Miss Junie and loaded our bags onto another, slightly larger and more comfortable riverboat. We rode for about two and a half hours to the Rio San Juan, the river that forms part of the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
Zaida had warned us there was a small possibility that the border agents might give her a hard time, and even perhaps forbid her to go any further, which would most likely mean she would have to meet us after we got back after two days in the rain forest. Fortunately, this didn’t happen. We stopped at the very spartan border station on the north side of the river on Nicaraguan soil. There were four casually-dressed soldiers just kind of hanging out outside the main building, with their automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.
The border stop was our first bathroom stop as well. All of the girls got gold stars for using the outhouses. Back on the boat, we were treated to a show-and-tell program by one of the soldiers. He pulled the biggest crawfish I’d ever seen out of a bucket. After about twenty minutes of wondering whether the authorities were going to let our tour guide continue our trip with us, Zaida rejoined us and brought our newly-stamped passports.
This was the day I started to get a real feel for what life was like for the people who live in this part of the country. After using the bathroom at our captain’s aunt’s house, I noted there were a couple of girls sitting in their school uniforms under a tree overlooking the river. It turns out they were waiting to be picked up, by boat, for school.
When we landed in the town of Sarapiqui, we ate lunch in a soda situated on a street corner that I swear could have been lifted up and transported in one piece from Purvis, Mississippi. People loitered around the diner watching soap operas. There was a general store across the street marked by a Coca Cola sign, its windows painted with sale prices. It was hot and humid. Replace the dense, overgrown jungle filled with monkeys and sloths and snakes with dense, overgrown pine forest filled with deer and possums and snakes and translate the locals’ conversations word for word into English, the two places become one in the same.
Mere will remark that after I had this epiphany, I repeated the phrase “Costa Rica is just like southern Mississippi” several times a day. After sharing this revelation of mine with my dad later over the phone, he agreed that it was the similarity of the slow-paced simple lifestyle of both areas was the reason he harbored such a fondness for the country. I could see my father being unassailably content holding up a surveyor’s marker beside one of the unpaved roads in the green Costa Rican countryside.
Once we’d eaten, we piled into a couple of tourist vans for a twenty minute drive to the Rara Avis office in Las Horquetas. Here we donned our rubber boots, and condensed our necessities for the next couple of days into daypacks, which we loaded onto a truck called a unimog that reminded me of one of the trucks that transports soldiers in a convoy. The seats were aligned such that passengers sat in the center facing to the left or the right of the truck’s direction. We took an unpaved road out of town that led through rainforest land that had been cleared for cattle. There were a couple of suspension bridges which I assume had weight restrictions, as most of our group had to get off the truck and walk across them. They even shook with the weight of a few pedestrians.
After we’d cleared the bridges, the real fun began. Rather than having been graded like a road in the States might have been, the dirt road followed the contour of the land exactly. This meant that the truck would have to build up speed before reaching a particularly steep hill, and overcoming the hill almost produced momentary weightlessness like in a roller coaster. The truck would tilt as it sped over curves or uneven ground. I put my feet on the side rails and stood almost straight up on some of the hairpin turns.
The total distance from the office to the hotel was ten kilometers, with a significant gain in elevation. After about six kilometers on the truck, we transferred all of our stuff to a trailer pulled by a tractor. No other vehicle could have made the trip - huge boulders covered in mud constituted the road up the hill. The rain forest began to close in around us as well. Additionally, the sun was setting.
We were met at the tractor by Josh, our guide for our time at Rara Avis. He was an expatriated American, and I wondered if he had come to Costa Rica to avoid responsibility for something. When we were three kilometers from the hotel, he led about ten of us on a hike on paths that crisscrossed the tractor road. Mere decided to stay on the tractor. The dense forest and encroaching clouds darkened the rocky path, and I was paranoid that a deadly spider or snake or poison tree frog would fall on me from an overhanging leaf.
I had to fully resort to my tiny penlight to guide my way during the last kilometer. The trailer lost a wheel on the road, so our whole group was reunited before we made a surprise river crossing in the dark. Dinner was waiting for us when we arrived at the lodge. The open air lodge was the hub of activity at the resort: the place for meals, meetings, games, etc. It was powered by a diesel generator starting around 5:30 each evening.
Our group slept in the two story hotel, which had no power but had warm water for showers. Josh showed us all our rooms and the theory of operation of the kerosene lamps that came with each room. We immediately became a problem for him. No one’s kerosene lamp worked correctly. Anthony and Melissa’s room had a bat in it and maybe even a bullet ant infestation. All in all, though, the hotel was quite comfortable for being smack in the middle of the rainforest. It certainly cooled down at night, a welcome change from the Caribbean lowlands.
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