Costa Rica Part3

Ok the computer just fucked with me, telling me it erased my part 2. Lying pile of shit. We set off for Turrialba bus station and while we waited for the bus to San Jose the owner of the hotel Herza turned up. They had been great to us for all of our stay, but Dom was surprised he was so nice as to come and see us off on our journey. Oh whoops. Apparently Mike had just accidentally kept the room key in his pocket and the hotel owner needed it. Ah strange how wrong first impressions can be sometimes. We were all mullered from lack of sleep and I was feeling physically sick. Once we arrived in San Jose we headed across to the bus station to get a bus for San Isidro De General. All of us were milling around waiting for the bus to go when some random guy sat down next to me and started to yammer gibberish to me in Spanish. I called over to Dom to see if he could understand it which distracted the others. Inka was working on something and Laura had noticed a guy come to mop up the spilled coke. Then the gibberish talker walked off. Strange. The next minute there was cry from Inka and the bag with all three guys' passports had been stolen. It must have been a distraction tactic to whip the bag away. Bollocks. Where could it have gone? Worse news for Laura, because she had already lost one passport on this trip up in Guatemala. Shit I tried to say to Mika we should scour the bus station as they may chuck what they dont need, but I did not feel to confident. The man cleaning the tables was nowhere to be seen amongst the staff and Dom was frantically trying to track the guy down. Inka was distraught and we tried to come up with a contingency plan and the mountain was off. We would have to stay in San Jose. Inka phoned home to get the card cancelled and the Finns were down from 3 cards to 1 for their trip now and the rest of the trip was badly damaged. I suggested we stay in our old San Jose hostel and we set off to make arrangements. Just as we were leaving a random guy in black walks up and hands back their bag. He claimed he found it on the side. They had their passports back again. They had lost around $60 and a bank card, but at least they could carry on with their journey. I wish someone had brought mine back in Santo Domingo. I could understand their despair when they lost them, but the relief and the euphoria must have been hard to deal with when they were miraculously returned. Sometimes you just get really lucky. It was suspicious, but we could not accuse the guy of much because it would be harsh if he was actually innocent. So we bought new seats on the next bus (we had got a refund on the old ones) and then proceeded to miss that bus through bad timekeeping. Fate really did not want us on that mountain. When we eventually did get on a bus we were supposed to, it left so late that we were forced to get a taxi onto the hostel in the small town at the base of Chirippo. We paid up the park entrance fee and made the taxi driver wait for 15 minutes before getting him to drive us further than he had expected. That will teach the guy to fleece us a bit. I found out they had no sleeping bags to rent. Fuck. I was going to die up there. I still vividly remembered Yellowstone. I discovered that Spurs had somehow beaten Villa away from home. We had a shot at Europe now. We had bought a load of food in San Jose and we now divided it up between the backpacks to climb to the summit (we were woefully underprepared for good meals but we had enough for subsistence). The hostel even managed to rent me out a sleeping bag and after a luxuriously needed rest that night we were ready to tackle the mountain in the morning.

The mountain is 3820m high (the highest in Central America. There are 3 higher volcanoes in Guatemala, but I am deliberately playing with semantics for my advantage). The trail is 14km to the hostel at the top and another 6km to the summit. The base is at 1500m more or less so we were going to ascend 2300m or so in one day, though originally we set off with the intention to summit it in the morning. Initially it started off brutally steep and I decided to time each of the mile stages to see our progress (they are clearly signposted). We hit the first one in 31 minutes and not including breaks it was the slowest we managed. The trail snakes up through pretty forests, but you don't feel like you are really on a mountain until you make it to around 11km into the trail. There is a hut about 7km into the trail for lunch breaks and it comes just before the brutal ascend between 8km and 10km. Its not too strenuous a trail and the pace at which we took it left me comfortably untired at the top (The mammoth amount of hiking on this trip has left me in great shape). Mika got the worst of it because he carried extra packweight for Laura and Inka. We had met a crazy Yankee old man who yomped this trail every once in a while but the ascent was marked by the veritable lack of people we came across. Only some Yankees at the top, who warned us not to head right at some rocks on the final ascent because it had taken them way off track. We felt duly warned and vowed to watch for this tricky pathway. We managed to reach the hostel for around 1.30pm having started to ascend at 6am. A comfortable time. Dom and I decided we wanted to push for the summit and take in a sunset from the top. We rattled along at a much faster pace of 5km an hour for the first part. We found the rocks the Yankees had mentioned and thought we were going the wrong way because it was too simple a path, but we soon realised the Yankees were the simple ones. They had somewhow gone direct right and forded a river. How can you do that by accident? Oh well. We missed the path off to the left for the lake because the fog was in heavy and the final 200m is a brutal near vertical scramble that would damage Dom's knee and leave me in need of a few breaks. It is the toughest part of the climb. At the top we signed into the book and this was now officially the highest I had ever been by 220m. Cotopaxi is going to piss on that record. I had not suffered at all from altitude sickness and I did not even think the air was any thinner at this altitude. So Inca Trail should be easy enough. We had covered the final 6km in an hour and a half. We rested and admired the fog. Fucking Poas all over again. Then it started to clear. But only in stages. Sort of like a musician toying with your patience. Directing us this way and that to see the lakes, then the valley, then the sea, then another lake. Piece by piece the mountain divulged her beauty to us until finally the grand finale as the fog cleared up and we could see both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Awesome. Dom and I froze a little waiting for the fogs performance and played with a little ball on the mountain top, while I explained my plans for Colombia and he seemed to like the idea. Then we descended as the sun came down and covered the ground back in the dark. We had had to borrow a camping stove and gas to cook dinner and all of us turfed in expecting to get up early to summit again. At least that was the plan.

The others were up at 2am to summit the mountain, but Dom and I decided to lie in and sleep. They made it and back by 8am although Laura had further injured her leg. With her injury and Dom's bad knee we were in serious danger of missing the bus at 2pm from the base back to San Isidro. Damn it. I had no money and there were no ATM's here. I decided we would set a rhythmic march down and time the stages. Its motivational to give a sense of progress and it also fires the competitive spirit when you are attemtping to beat you previous record. We decided to have breakfast quickly first and the gas caught fire as Mika cooked with it. We all ducked expecting a kitchen explosion but it fizzled out, we ate and set off. At the beginning we set off at a rapid clip and averaged 15 minute kilometres. That was more than fast enough and even after lunch we were over half an hour up on where we needed to me. The only dispiriting moment came when we missed the 3km marker and we thought we were slowing down too much. The others were still limping along so Mika and I decided to set off rapidly ahead and get the stuff ready from storage in the hostel. We set the fastest kilometre at 10 minutes and I felt that was a good effort. Back in the hostel we got everything ready for the others and prepared everything. Just then the skies opened fire on us. Laura was going to pack her history book on the outside of the back spine down in a storm. Dom offered to take it to stop the lunacy and we set off. I have no rain coat at this point so I was battered beyond belief and most of my wardrobe got cleaned out. I was fast running out of clothes, but made a fast time to the bus stop where I realised my dry change of clothes were actually wetter than the pair that had got wet on the walk. Fuck. We got the bus back into San Isidro and found a hotel with 5 beds in one room. Nice. Saves logistics. I went out to see if Tom was joining us as planned. Instead he had pushed onto Panama City across the border and because I had received a positive answer from the Dutch girl I was in no mood to cross just yet. I proposed to Dom that in the morning we should head to Manuel Antonio and then push on via Turrialba to Bocas Del Toro. He liked the plan and the Finns made preparations to push the other way to the Caribbean coast in the morning. We would meet up again on saturday for Inka's birthday.

San Isidro de General seems to have an unbelievable number of fit women. Its population is only 40,000, which is half the size of my home town, but it probably has 100 times more good looking women. It may even have been fitter than San Jose (Costa Rican women in general were pretty good looking). We grabbed dinner and then headed for some ice cream. I asked for some ice cream and some coke and they put some ice cream in a coke cup. I was laughing as Dom thought they were going to pour coke on top of this. Not sure what they were doing, but I am not sure they did either. We were still having the same left and right issues. The locals would point right and tell you something was left. I think we met only three Costa Ricans who were able to tell left from right. Now they would say it and any of our group would just burst out laughing from the ridiculousness of it. The Finns had gone back to sleep as they had been up since 2am, but Dom and I went to sit in the square and ended up adopting a cute puppy we named Astoria after our hotel. He had followed us back so we let him stay in the room. Thought in the middle of the night he drank from the toilet bowl and I had to let him outside. Later there were yelps at the door but the owner scared him off so we never found out what happened to him. Indeed Inka and Mika never even saw him. In the morning there were what looked like paw prints in sick down the corridor so I assume he was sick after the toilet water and the owner kicked him out. Was sad as he was a really cool puppy.