A dose of Salts...: Corcovado National Park

It’s not every day you get to visit somewhere pegged by National Geographic (and then shamelessly quoted by the Loney Planet) as ‘The most Biologically Intense Place on Earth’. We were lucky enough to visit the quite simply mind-blowing Corcovado National Park for the first three days of our Christmas adventure.

It’s not the easiest place to get to-it’s stuck out on a peninsula on the Southern Pacific Coast and is usually overlooked by tourists as it is simply too tricky to get to within normal holiday timeframes. We have the luxury of time, so we decided this was one we couldn’t miss.

To get there you need to get to Palma Norte by bus, then take an over-flowing local bus to Sierpe, then pick up a speed boat ride to Drake Bay. It was a long day! Our boat left at 4pm and took just over an hour, zooming through pretty awesome mangroves (I never get bored of mangroves!), then skirting the coastline. It being 4pm, we had the wonderful bonus that it you spend the last 20 minutes of the trip basking in light of a spectacular Sun set…We kind of had the feeling this was going to be a good trip!

We had two days in Drake Bay so on the first we took ourselves for a hike along the coastal walk. Now I know I have a habit in waxing lyrical about the places we visit, but my god this walk blew me away! In fact, dare I say it, I think this walk even trumped the incredible Abel Tasman walk we did back in March….and that’s saying something! It is basically a two and a half-hour walk along the coast and back, passing incredibly picturesque and deserted beach after incredibly picturesque and deserted beach. The forest leads right up to the shore so each beach is a palm-fringed beauty! To add to our pleasure, the walk was literally riddled with wildlife!...Toucans, white-faced capuchins, scarlet macaws, incredible birds of prey, oodles of insects, howler monkeys, lizards, turkeys…..you get the idea! The walk was supposed to be 2.5 hours each way but it took us 8 hours as we had to stop every 5 minutes!!! Simply beautiful!

Not a bad spot for a coffee!

Heron on the beach

Scarlet Macaw

On our second day we paid a small fortune to take a boat and a compulsory nature guide on a hike in the actual National Park. Corcovado National Park is 424 square kilometres in area and is the largest NP in Costa Rica. It was set up in 1975 and has been left mostly untouched since….hence it has an absolute ton of animals, some of which are extremely rare. The headliner is the tapier as there are only 1500 of that particular species left in the wild….and many of them are found in the park.

Peak-a-boo!

The boat ride itself is spectacular-an hour-long ride hugging the coastline, and that entire stretch of lush jungle we passed between Drake Bay and the station was National Park. And here’s the best bit…apparently the rules are so tight that no-one is allowed to set foot there, on the beaches or jungle (I guess unless you’re a park ranger). How refreshing! It’s not often you get to see that much untouched rainforest. Throw in a brief turtle spot and a couple of friendly dolphins passing by, our first Brown-Footed Boobies, wind in your hair and sun on your face, and you can actually feel your soul being soothed. It certainly did a little to undo my current feeling that the condition of the world is in a rapidly downward spiral.

We had a wonderful day in the park. It did feel a little overly organised after our many other exploits in the jungle-you arrive with about 60 other people and then spend the morning trailing a guide and passing other groups also trailing their guides down well-worn tracks. However, while this takes away a little of the lost-in-the-jungle magic that we love so much, it does mean that you see heaps of wildlife as the guides tip each other off, and I’d rather there was one little area of well-walked jungle which is funding the protection of the rest of it, than people being let loose all over the forest.

All in all a rather marvellous weekend!