Hiking Osa, PART I: Getting there

Photo©Philipp

Duration of the trip including transport: 7 days;
Hiking: 4 days;

Not much time is left in Costa Rica. A good reason to have more adventures. The trip to the Osa Peninsula (Corcovado National Park) was certainly the highlight and an extremely beautiful experience.
It started with an excursion from the volcanologia class to Quepos which is found at the Pazific coast, pretty far in the south. A Tsunami warning, related to an earthquake (8), delayed everything because it was unsafe to go to the beach according to the radio. Fortunately, the Tsunami never hit the coast and we could continue several hours later. Searching for nice Olivin cristals was the primary goal. The day ended with a wonderful view from a restaurant where we enjoyed some beers.
Quepos is pretty far in the south at the pazific coast. Osa is a little peninsula in the very southwest of Costa Rica, close to the border of Panama and is the country´s highlight regarding animals. It has the second highest mamal diversity in the world!
However, it wasn´t easy to get there. It took us 2 days. First, we had to go east to San Isidro. A bad bus connection made us stay there for a while although we had left at 5 in the morning. Not too bad because we could do some important shopping, like buying useful machetes for coconuts. We also met some Austrian, guys who were having breakfast there.
We could finally get a bus south to Palmar Norte in the afternoon, but we drove directely into the monsum. We grabbed a taxi to Sierpe from Palmar Norte. There, we spent another night. Sierpe is located north of the biggest mangrove forest of Central America. The idea was to continue from this town to Drake by boat. We very lucky and found a boat at the next day which brought us south, down the river, along the coast to Drake. High waves and a good captain made this trip kind of save but definitely really exciting. We landed a little farther south east of Drake at a lodge, to which the boat belonged too.
The story continues.........