Day 6 - Mud... water... mud.. water

 Woke up... really early... and dragged myself down to the centre of Puerto Jiminez.... to the bakery..

Here we were supposed to meet our guide for the next 3 days. When I signed up for tge jungle trek, I picked the hardest longest route. Essentially trek in... trek out.. whereas pretty much everybody chooses the bpat in, walk out or walk in boat out option.

So having said that, I was intruigued as to whom would be joining me on this tour. I knew only 2 others were on this tour but picking them out of the crowd gathered at the bakery was not easy.

A few could be discounted by the flipflops or as I saw on one girl, a fashion raincoat... not the sort of clothes you wear for a 3 day trek.

Me, I was wearing my white shorts, which were already filthy so I figured a few more days of dirt wouldn't matter. I had a small rucksack with one change of clothes in, a small amount of snacks and the essentials like mosquito spray and rain jacket.

Eventually the crowd whittled down as group by group they found their guide and a taxi.

That left me, a couple called Dave and Lilli from Bend, Oregon, and our guide Jenkins, who looked the part and seemed full of enthusiasm for our little trek.

Dave was an ER nurse and Lilli a teacher so we swopped stories of shifts and type of work amd then moved on to interests. Dave... he's a bird nut...

Lilli, well Lilli seemed like she would be happy with anything that crossed her path

Jenkins... definately a plant man, descended from a line of medicine men but looked forward to seeing the tapir and the anteater and again pretty. much anything. 

Obviously me. with the reptile madness... we made quite a group but the initial signs were that we could at least rub along for a few days and might turn out to be good friends by the end of it.

We set off. by taxi and to my delight we were going to start at La Tarde.! If you remember, Eduardo said he might have a baby Fer De Lance to. show me if we came his way, so Im excited to see if that was the case.

We bumped down familiar roads, Jenkins providing commentary on much the same stuff Arturo had told me on the way there.

Eventually we went down the slope into La Tarde. Eduardo was there and I went over to see if he had the promised Terciopele.

He did. So smol, so cute. A little reactive thing with such a sweet little face. I was enchanted... the others not so much but I think they still thought it was cool!

And then we set off... through the trees and began the trail into Corcovado. It was a few miles to Los Patos and the beginning of the park and as I knew from my night walk, these trails were not flat! The ground was a reddy orange clay which was pretty slippery when wet as it now was and woth the roots and the slopes, it all combined to make for a pretty treacherous beginning to the hike.

One of the first plants jenkins showed us was the soap plant. He gathered a bunch of leaves and got me to pour some water on them and then he crushed them a little in his hand. I then poured some more water on, he crushed them a bit more... and suddenly there was soap and the leaves made a good scourer It was pretty cool and the first time of many that Jenkins amazed us with plant knowledge. 

Today was more about the hike in and we had to keep us a reasonable pace in order to get to Sirena, where we would be sleeping, in good time. That said we stopped whenever jenkins found something useful to show us..

the ladder vine, which is what ibruprofen came from.... 

the strangling ficus which grows from. the branches of a tree and gradually strangles the host tree until there is an empty shell left... 

tracks in the mud (the slippery thick kind of mud) of an ocelot and then further on a tapir... 

the tree that walks its roots towards the light... 

So many fascinating things... but there was a hike to get on with. 

The mud was an ever present obstacle amd we started naming the types, all of them requiring the word slippery or balloso (not sure if spelled right). The mud was often preceded by a wide but reasonably shallow body of water and it became a running joke... more mud... more water

We then heard the crashing above that indicated monkeys and stopped to watch as a group of squirrel monkeys danced overhead. So graceful, so unafraid, they would come dow  quite close to grab a nice looking fruit and then scamper up to the safety of a higher  branch to eat. 

This was the first of many monkey encounters during that day and the 2 subsequent days but I never got fed up of watching them. Lilli delighted in the monkeys as well and even birder Dave declared spider monkeys to be so awesome! 

A bit further on, the shout of snake went up from Jenkins... there was a kind of racer,  a stripe under its eye. God it was fast but Jenkins managed to catch it and handed him over to me. 

I was admiring him. when. suddenly I felt something on my hand and looked down, more in surprise than pain and there was the little brave fella, mouth wide open.. 

chomping down as hard as he could.. on my hand! Awww so cute. Such a little smol thing thinks he is big and bad enough to take me on... how sweet! Having chomped on my hand and not getting the reaction he wanted... that is me throwing him back to the ground... he then decided to put up and shut up and stayed nicely in my. hand until all our photos were taken. I just wish I had one of him with my hand in his mouth... it was super cute and made my day (yeah I know, I'm wierd!) 

We had progressed through some more mud, thin slippery mud this time and arrived at quite a wide river... socks. and shoes off and we started to wade across. I personally had no. flip flops so was barefoot and found it really. painful. treading on the rocks at the bottom. I decided that the next river would be done with shoes on... wet shoes be dammed. 

We then had a bit of a rest in a most idyllic spot... in fact every spot where river and jungle. collided was idyllic and it was tempting to just stay there and breathe in. the fresh jungle smell and listen to the shriek of the mcaws or the chirrup of the monkeys. 

But onward we went. 

Another racer snake was spotted but this one was too fast to catch.. I did try. 

More monkeys overhead... squirrel monkeys again... 

It started to rain at some point in the afternoon.... the slippery clay mud, now turned to thick slippery clay mud and it took a lot of energy to shlurp our way through it all. That and a lot of concentration not to trip or slip on the many roots and vines hidden in the mud. 

I think we were all starting to get a bit tired. We had come a long way in this terrain and although it had flattened out a bit, it was now more muddy and becoming flooded so that at one point we were wading along the trail rather than walking.... it reminded me. of the Everglades! 

The rain then started to come down it bucketloads. Dave had put on his batman poncho garbage sack, Lilli tried hers but didnt like walking in it, I put on my rainjacket, even though I was soaked underneath already. The flatter trail now had a flash flood running down it... it had become. seriously wet and we were wading and sploshing and squelching along, teying to up the pace, even though we were tired and wet through. I think it is testament to us all that we were still smiling and cracking. jokes about... more mud... more water. 

Frankly the weather was abysmal but it was quite funny and as it turned out once of the highlights for all of us on this trip. We marched our way through the floodwaters, one foot in front of the other until finally we reached a clearing... Sirena

We had made it!! 18 miles done! 

We could see dry people. sitting on the wooden covered verandah, drinking their drinks looking at us, probably wondering what on earth we were doing... we were cheering. and high fiving for making it through. I think after that, we would have all followed jenkins to the ends of the earth 😂🌎

We staggered over, took off our sodden shoes (I had waded through every river crossing bar the first with them on) and had just enough time before dinner to dump our kit and have a shower. I found my only other spare dry set of clothes and gratefully put them on. Then we jumped in the q for dinner. 

We realised that in order to hire boots for the next day we had to do it now, so whilst jenkins kept our place, we ran and found a pair of boots to fit,  handed over 5 dollars (best 5 I have ever spent) and raced back to the q. 

Dinner... omg... so good. And sooo much. My eyes were definately bigger than my stomach for sure. The guys here did a fantastic job with the cooking for so many people, 3 meals a day. It was traditional food. Rice, beans meat veg and the same rice pudding thing I had had at Eduardo's

Then we crashed.... at 7pm... lights went out at 8pm. No night walks allowed (rumor has it that someone was killed by a jaguar). To be fair, I was sooo tired and we had to get up sooo early again that sleep was not a problem! 

Lets see what tomorrow brings! 

(im slowly catching up with the blogs... I go back to San Jose on the bus tomorrow so have an eight hour bus journey to help catch up!)