Corcovado National Park
Carate,
Costa Rica
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The big thing to see is Corcovado National Park. There is only one road that goes from Puerto Jiminez (where we were two days ago) to Carate and Matapalo is on the way. Carate has one of two entrances to the Corcovado National Park (the other is Bahia Drake, way more touristy and popular).
The stretch of road from Puerto Jiminez to Matapalo was pretty crappy and had a few stream crossings (This stretch of road requires a 4x4, can't do it without). The stretch from Matapalo to Crate is disastrous. Lonely Planet lists this road in the top ten worst roads in Costa Rica (you know its a terrible road when its in the top 10 list of bad roads of a country that has the worst normal roads ever, seriously the normal roads are terrible here). Really glad we have a 4x4 so that we can actually do this. Besides looking like the road is laced with holes created by grenades, there are several river crossings. The road goes right through these rivers, apparently you can't really get through them in the rainy season. We had water up to the bottom part of the door (like two feet off the ground) and saw the water come up over the hood when Charlie drove too fast through it. It was pretty sweet, I was kind of bummed that I couldn't drive. Lisa was getting seriously freaked out by the road and driving on it. Kind of a bummer, it was like Charlie and I were two kids in toy store but we couldn't touch any of them.
We eventually made it to Carate. We grabbed some lunch at a really expensive eco-lodge called Luna Lodge and took off to the park. The park was quite beautiful. Two kinds of monkeys, lots of hermit crabs, regular crabs,lizards and all kinds of stuff. A group of people we passed said they saw a puma, but we never saw it. We putzed around in the park for a couple of hours and swam in the river that dumped out into the ocean.
We made it back to one of the other eco-lodges in Carate for a tuna dinner (kind of expensive, but really tasty). Before dinner there was a beautiful sunset (it was Lisa's first sunset over the pacific). The eco-lodge was close to the park entrance and the park entrance is about an hours walk on the beach from Carate. So we walked back in the dark along the beach back to our car. It was beautiful since there wasn't a moon out, so we could see all the stars (another side benefit to being in the middle of no where and having no electricity).
