Recollections from travels in Costa Rica – 1981-1986

Just north of San José, looms Braulio Carrillo National Park, a rugged park of almost 500 square kilometres. Braulio has an elevation variation of almost 3000 metres so you’ve got seven life zones from cloud forest to lowland tropical forest. Yet despite its proximity to San José most of the park was rarely visited in the 1980s simply because it was impenetrable. A highway completed in the late 1980s changed that and now Braulio is probably the most visited park, although most people would just drive through and view the park from their automobiles.

Trees are hardly just trees in a tropical rain forest. They are home to countless species of flora and fauna. The problem is that when you are in a tropical rain forest you simply can’t see the forest canopy. By walking on the highway under construction though in Braulio I could gaze straight down some incredibly steep terrain and get views of the forest from above.

I was camping at the summit of Volcán Barva in Braulio Carrillo National Park and at dawn stepped out of my tent to have a look around. There was a rare bit of sunlight as often Volcán Barva is shrouded in clouds and a ray of light shone directly on this Lobelia flower still glistening from morning dew.

Have you ever thought about how long you’ve gone without seeing another human being? If you locked yourself inside your home and closed the blinds I guess you could last for a while but most of us will only go for a few hours when we are completely alone. In April of 1983 I went for 42 hours without seeing another human.

It was the Easter long weekend and everything pretty much shuts down in Costa Rica and none of my mates were around so I packed my backpack and headed up alone to Braulio Carrillo National Park.

At the time the Costa Rican government was building a major highway which bisected the park and provided a much shorter route between San Jose and Guapiles and the whole northeastern part of the country. I figured the road crews would take the holiday off so I thought it would be great opportunity to reach parts of Braulio which until then were inaccessible. As expected there was no sign of any life. So I spent the weekend hiking down the roadbed and getting some fantastic views of the rainforest.

I found a fairly level spot off the road and set up camp the first night. In the middle of the night I was awoken from a deep sleep and I realised the earth was shaking. EARTHQUAKE! The clouds had rolled in and it was pitch black in the tent like a tomb. I was fearful of mudslides and falling trees. I jumped out of the tent and shined my torch around and decided the spot I had chosen looked pretty secure so I crawled back into the tent and went back to sleep.

When I returned home a few days later I found broken picture frames on the floor of the house and discovered that no one in San Jose had slept that night and many would not even go back into their homes. It was a major earthquake at 7.3 on the Richter scale and caused one death from falling debris and five more from heart attacks.

The next day I hiked deeper into the park somewhat eager to find someone to ask about the earthquake. But I was all alone and for all I knew the earth opened up and swallowed everyone else. I found the beautiful pool and cascade shown in this picture and stripped off my clothes and went skinny dipping. I couldn’t have been happier.

The next day I descended from the mountains and eventually saw some human beings. It depressed me as I had been so content having time on my own to appreciate the wild. But ‘así es la vida’ and my 42 hours of being a hermit were over.

The biggest problem with travelling alone is that you’ve got no one to pose for your photos. And since I travelled alone a lot in Costa Rica, I had to rely on lots of selfies. I wanted to get a person at the base of the cascade in Braulio Carrillo, so I set the camera on a tripod and jumped in the freezing cold water and tried to swim to the falls before the shutter opened. I never quite got the pose quite right. I saw no reason to wear clothes so I was dashing in and out of the water as nature had intended me to be. Sometime later someone told me that this was the Rio Sanguijuela – or Leech River.