sin tetas, no hay paraiso.

translation: no tits, no paradise. can´t take credit for that maxim; it was the title of one among many cinematic masterpieces hanging on the wall (amid signs reminding patrons that viewing porn on the internet won´t be tolerated...apparently you need to rent it from them) of a less-than-glamorous internet hole we used during an unexpected trip back to san jose this past week. why, you might rightfully wonder, would anyone waste almost three precious days in (aside from san jose) gortgeous costa rica lurking around seedy internet cafes? let me tell you a story...

almost two weeks ago (that time has flown, whoa), david and i dutifully arose at the crack of dawn to catch our bus down to puerto jimenez for our adventure into the jungle. all packed, reorganized, and loaded with luggage and food, we made it to the bus station (in the even uglier side of san jose) just in time to learn our earliness (you read that right) would allow us the last two seats on the last morning bus out of town. after a little scrambling, we had hardly stepped foot onto the bus when i noticed that neither i nor david was carrying my purse. and of course, by then, it was long gone.

nothing puts a damper on jungle adventures like having your passport, license, cash, and credit cards stolen. not to mention my camera with literally hundreds of pictures, my sunglasses (believe me when i say this is a travesty in itself), my book (thank GOD i finished twilight the previous evening or the suspense might literally have killed me), my tweezers (i saw my first real mirror today after two weeks of no plucking...hello frida kahlo), my motion sickness meds (that´s too bad for everyone on the bus), and my prescriptioned glasses (i don´t see any puma...).

we tried to head straight for the embassy only to learn that may 1 is labor day here, and everything is closed. so after allowing ourselves a deserved 15 minutes of pouting or so, we rearranged things a bit and hopped on a later bus so as not to cramp our jungling style further. and to be honest, i kinda enjoyed my identityless week in the jungle. it helped me feel more animalistic and primal. and for as low as the us embassy set the bar over the phone, they were all stars in person. we walked in at 8:20 am, and by 10 that morning i was walking out with my new passport. can´t really complain about that. so all in all, certainly not the end of the world, though obviously it would have been nice not to have to deal with the aftermath, in costa rica or in michigan (sorry, mom! because leaving you in charge of the whole wedding wasn´t burdensome enough...).

in any event, on to the more interesting part of the last several days. we arrived about 5 hours behind schedule in puerto jimenez, a tiny town relatively speaking, but the largest (only) town on the osa peninsula, the last little finger jutting out into the pacific before you hit panama. there we met paul, the ¨character¨who organized our trip for us. for the wealth of knowledge this guy possesses, he couldn´t have been less helpful...he sent us into the jungle with poor advice that came back to haunt us again and again. you´d be surprised how far small comforts like sheets and mosquito nets go in one of the harshest environments... but exhausted as we were at that point, we packed david´s school backpack with our jungle goods, forked over $10 for our last air conditioning for weeks, and passed out.

at 5am the next morning, we stumbled outside to meet our (handsome) guide, roger, and were on our way. we picked up lunch at a local panaderia, fueled up for the looooong day on some pinto, and mounted our horses for the first leg of our trip. corcovado national park is awesomely remote, as david too will attest. this is great for nature enthusiasts who are also very fit (or in my case, very unfit, but able to sack up for a couple days of long hikes if it means seeing cool animals), because you are almost totally alone and certainly not at the top of the food chain or in the majority species by a stretch, and just able to connect more to the jungle and feel rewarded when you can´t help but stumble upon tons of animals just meters from where you sleep at night. very cool.

you can do the whole walk from la palma, the last hint of civilization on the east side of park, into sirena, the largest station inside the park (and the only one that provides food--and believe me, you don´t want to carry provisions for that many days for that many miles), but it adds a couple more kilometers and several river crossings to an already very long hike. the lesser evil is to enter on horseback (though that point is still up for debate between david and i, since he got a little more saddle sore than roger and i...), though that too has its´downfalls. very painful bruising aside, i was glad to keep my feet dry, but more so to forever have the image of david´s horse randomly getting fired up and galloping full speed ahead of the rest of us with his rump getting tooled in the saddle in the most painful looking way. haha, i just giggled again thinking about it.

after two hours of riding, we dismounted and began the 20k hike into sirena. the terrain was moderately hilly at best (nothing compared to cerro chato, which rendered me parapalegic for no fewer than four days), but the earth is mostly clay, and with a fresh coat of rain on it, it had the appearance of chicken tikka masala, and the feel of a discarded banana peel. at least it didn´t smell like chicken tikka masala--i imagine that might get stifling after 8 hours of hiking. actually, like its´distinct sounds, the jungle has a lot of distinct smells. sometimes floral, sometimes like garlic, sometimes like peccary (sweaty boar), and i doubt david or i will ever forget the suffocating aroma of rotting figs, which often blanket the jungle floor. anyhow, given that i can barely walk without stumbling on a normal sidewalk, my eyes were plastered to the ground for the next several days unless someone gave me a forceful shove to look up at something.

we saw mostly birds on the first hike, and sorry all you birders, but knowing how many hours i had ahead of me, i got a little antsy whipping out the binoculars to check out every humming bird (though my god, they are jewel toned and beautiful here). we also saw several spider monkeys (don´t stand under those guys, they like to pee to assert dominance), squirrel monkeys (endangered! and super cute), some neat spiders and lizards. this was my first time seeing monkeys outside of captivity, and i was totally awestruck at a) how HUMAN they are, in their appearance and actions, and b) the way they move. i had always wished as a kid to live for a day as a dolphin, a hawk, or a siberian tiger. but sheeit, i totally gave monkeys the shaft...not a lotta things have ever looked more fun to me than being able to swing, jump, and navigate the tangle of vines and branches like those awesome distant cousins of ours.

the real excitement began maybe two thirds into the hike, 3 hours out from sirena, when i got a forceful shove not to look at another hummingbird, but to look at our faithful guide who was hopping furiously on one foot and loudly whispering (even after a possible ankle break, we still don´t raise our voices in the jungle. you just don´t do that) ¨SHIT SHIT SHIT.¨ and so our troubles began. apparently the injury looked so bad in action david thought it might actually be broken, but roger put on his first of many brave faces as we jog-limped the final stretch into sirena.

if there hadn´t been so many people sitting on the porch (dawn and dusk are the prime times for passive animal sightings there, as both peccaries and pumas have routes that bisect sirena´s sprawling lawn), i mighta actually bent and kissed the floor of this odd oasis in the middle of dense jungle, that strikes more than a slight resemblance to the barracks of the dharma initiative (cue the horns, seriously). sirena provides a slight suggestion of comfort in a rather harsh environment...lots of dorm rooms, a small cafeteria, and a big covered platform to pitch tents. but it´s HUGE...can probably house at least 40 people at a time, though at most we only had maybe 20 around us, and sometimes none.

we quickly began examining the various characters around the station...belgian jungle boy who never said much but walked around the jungle barefoot and somehow always looked like he just had a shower (and a hot one, not a painful rinse under the spickets of freezing water that are available there...never once did i feel even the suggestion of coolness there, yet somehow, shower water is piped directly from a glacial stream), various tour groups large and small, and a young swedish chick with two girls under 5 and an infant that we later confirmed was less than three weeks old...you can imagine the fun i had trying to figure out what a swede would be doing with essentially a fetus in the middle of the densest of costa rican jungles...fun group. and maybe i just got a little too jungly, but i certainly felt a bond even with the people with whom i never exchanged words, because we´re all obviously into nature, and willing to sacrifice much comfort to see the best of the best.

after a dinner consisting of about one third the amount of food it might have taken to compensate for 8 hours of hiking, david and i returned to our tiny dorm room (danker. warmer. stickier. least comfortable.) thrilled to find we suddenly had electricity. after wetting maybe 10% of my skin in the ice shower (even at the hottest i´ve ever been in my life, that did not feel good once), we attempted to make the room sleepable, despite not having proper sheets (secured in our luggage in puerto jimenez, thanks paul) to put on the 50 year old foam mattresses (what up, scabies). as suddenly as the elctricity appeared, it disappeared, leaving david and i giggling nervously and exhaustedly in the pitch black 8pm hour (my headlamp was of course stolen without ever being deflowered, and david´s ran out of batteries before our arrival), and after somehow accruing 6 new bruises on my blind 4 pace walk to my bed, we began the worst night of sleep in costa rica, which is a true feat on its´own.

we awoke on day 2 to find that roger not only had an ankle the size of a basketball, but was feverish and sore as well...not the kind of symptoms you hope to hear at the height of the swine flu "pandemic." david and i begged him to rest for the morning, and did pretty well on our first solo hike (perhaps more a testament to the abundant wildlife than our jungle skills), crossing paths with agoutis (cross betwen a rat, rabbit, and squirrel), more monkeys, many turkeys (weird seeing familiar things like turkeys, hens, and deer in a totally unfamiliar landscape), collared peccaries (we lucked out running into the non-attack and murder variety while on our own) and then on the riverbank, herons, egrets, and even a big as$ crocodile warming its´cold blood in the blistering costa rica sun (luckily, on the opposite shore). shortly after returning to the station, roger hit his low point of spirits with ¨no quiero morirme aqui¨(i don´t want to die here), and we discussed various options of how david and i might make it out of the park on our own as we fed roger enough aspirin that he might actually have developed an ulcer over the next few days.

that evening though, roger sacked up again and took us for a super successful night hike, with lots of amphibians, beetles, and some bird that nobody actually saw, but david gripped in his hand thinking it was fruit on the branch of a tree. i don´t know who was more terrified, but i´m guessing that bird died of a heart attack shortly thereafter, and both of them spontaneously shat. this was also the night of our big puma sighting (which, thanks to some hijo de puta--sorry jeannette-- living it up on my credit cards in san jose, i couldn´t actually see).

it doesn´t take long to get into a routine there...without electricity (and with howlers waking the jungle at 4:30am), our circadian rhythym seamlessly switched to being awake during daylight, and being asleep shortly after the sun sets. we like that routine. it feels good. after the swedish jungle clan left, i asked our handsome guide to call in yet another favor, and since nobody can apparently say no to roger, we upgraded to the luxury suite of sirena--a large, empty screened in room with a coupla foam pads on the floor. i was able to semi-burrito myself in my single fitted sheet, and stuck the camera case under my foam scabies pad as a makeshift pillow, all of which allowed me to sleep a precious few hours each night. that, and i made david let me wear his watch and hold my hand at night so i would be less anxious.

to us, 8pm continues to be a late night, and i don´t remember the last time we slept past 5:30 in the morning. the air was at least 100% saturated with humidity 24 hours a day, and utterly windless. david and i used to sit on the sirena porch and laugh at the monstrous and permanently limp windsock in the middle of the lawn. i didn´t even know it was a windsock until that word got tossed into a conversation. you expend enough energy just standing still that within 15 minutes of rising, you´re sweating more than the final pose of a bikram yoga class. i had no clue i was able to sweat this much day after day, and all i wanted was for a part of my clothing or even my hair to not be drenched in sweat so i could remember what it felt like to have a dry face. even hanging to dry for over 24 hours in the sun, my quickdry clothing was in a permanent stage of dampness. i got used to putting on wet socks and underwear in the morning, to drinking liters upon liters of water and still only producing about a tablespoon of orange urine each day (which then got wiped on my soaked shirt because air drying obviously is not an option there), and wasn´t so much surprised at the erruption of diaper rash all over my a$$ as how painful diaper rash is! be gentle when changing your babies!

anyway, turns out roger got a little caught up in the flu hype, and was pretty much back to baseline 24 hours later. on day three, he was fortunately with us to encounter the other variety of peccaries, white lipped, one of which almost made a tasty lunch out of david´s patella. apparently, if you see those guys, climb a tree asap. or hide behind your half dead guide who is menacingly swinging his walking stick like a baseball bat and hope for the best. we saw our first of many tapir tracks (though sadly, never an actual tapir), and our first coati family (cute guys in the raccoon family), and the elusive howler monkeys (though they dutifully wake at 4:30 each morning with bellows you wouldn´t believe). that evening, we saw a greater concentration of sharks, puffer fish, and crocodiles than we hope ever to confront under less controlled circumstances, ie, while actually in the water...a buncha bull sharks get stuck in the sirena river mouth because of the tide making it look like a trout pool at chavelos. except with sharks. i think roger might have asked a total of 20 times if we wanted to take a swim. that one never gets old to him.

on our last day in the park, we had a final meager breakfast (i had to routinely hand over half my food to david so he wouldn´t literally waste away and then gorge myself on numerous full bowls of granola dowsed in 2% milk...you would have to see this to believe it because i hardly believed my own hunger myself), and began the 20k hike out of the park, waving godbye to toucans, white lipped and collared peccaries, a spider monkey that responded by throwing a branch at my head, an anteater, mccaws, and our first white faced capucins (we saw all four monkey species in costa rica, sweet) along the way.

among ocelot and puma tracks, we battled the incoming tide (not surprisingly, i lost), sprinting across stretches of jagged-rocky beach (someone had the sense of humor to name one of these long rocky beaches "salsipuedes," or, "get out if you can") through foot deep curtains of gnats, pouring with sweat such that sunscreen wasn´t a realistic option and our clothes were too saturated to wipe our faces, adding to the roster of already existing discomfort (bites, rashes, funguses, blisters) heat rash and sunburn. and with nothing to eat but a coupla pieces of white bread and bologna. that was one of the longer walks of my life. but of course, it was peppered with awesomeness like an overgrowth of gorgeous hibiscus bushes amid a very random and very tiny cemetary right in the middle of the jungle, or three generations of coatis that might as well have been lap dogs they were so friendly.

after bidding a tearful goodbye to roger (i just love that guy!), we emerged into the ¨town¨of carate, population 50 including tourists, for a much needed night of luxury. and by luxury, i mean a slightly less cold shower, potable water, and a mosquito net. no, to be honest, the lookout inn is absolutely stunning (and you pay for those views with a brutal hike up a driveway that is as close to a 90 degree angle as you can get without having to defy gravity to ascend), and i want to move to carate forever. miles of totally uninhabited black sand beach (costa rica, clothing optional), houses set above the ocean on cliffs covered in mango and almond trees and hibiscus flowers, outdoor showers and bathrooms...sigh. i never wanted to leave.

but we´ll have to continue this next leg later as this entry has already grown far too long...i hope that above all we have been able to convey even slightly that corcovado is nothing short of magical. it is a true treasure and one of the most spectacular places i´m sure we´ll ever see (and neither of us are novice travelers by any means). the rashes, bites, burns, blisters, constant hunger, exhaustion, inability to sleep comfortably, realizing you´ve come to smell like a peccary yourself...this all serves to enrich the experience, and of course, your life. i yearn to hear a howler barking me out of sleep at 4:30, and i admit, i was nostalgic to wash my jungle clothes...it was like erasing a part of ourselves. we earned that stench. fortunately, david´s leather watchband is forever enstenched since i refused to remove it during hikes, and whenever my left wrist gets too close to my face at night and the death-odor actually rouses me from sleep, i smile (after i make sure i´m not dying). to be so alone, so vulnerable, so powerless, to always wonder what lies around the next turn, and at the back of your mind to constantly be hoping you don´t die tonight, not to mention the beauty and majesty that is the jungle...well, you just have to see for yourself. please go.

sloths: slowest.

i'm going to attempt to describe how slowly a sloth actually moves, although it's actually much slower than the following: if i were on a sloth hunt and made eye contact with a sloth high up in a tree, i would have time to fashion a ladder out of branches and vines, fall several times on this ladder since i'm not good at building things, fly my cousins ted and heidi in from upstate new york because they *are* good at building things, ask them to help me build me a ladder that works, climb this new ladder and nab my prey just as it managed to shift some weight to its feet in its mightiest effort to avoid capture.

apparently, sloths eat very little, and it's all leaves. as a result of consuming so few calories, their metabolisms are so slow that their pace is all they can handle. additionally, we've been told that the leaves that they do eat act in opiate-like ways, leading to a perpetual stoneyness on top of their baseline level of lazy. remarkable. the sloth was the first mammal we saw as we entered corcovado. as we watched, it appeared as though it was going to scratch itself. i wanted to catch a video of this event but unfortunately myself, ashley and our guide fell asleep 45 minutes later as we waited. also, despite having just been charged, the batteries on our camera ran dead before his hand reached his body. slowest.

as far as we're concerned, corcovado national park is costa rica's hidden treasure, located in the most remote part of the country. just to get there we had to take an 8-hour bus ride from san jose, then a 30 minute cab ride, then a 2-hour horseback ride over the river and through some woods (bumpier. tougher on the groins.), then hike on foot for over eight hours just to get to our station. well, well worth the effort. it's amazing how free we felt from humanity being so alone (with our guide, roger- pronounced royer -) in as jungley a jungle as exists anywhere in the world. it's unfortunate that words (and pictures, for that matter) do very little to accurately reflect what it's like there. during our stay, we hiked constantly, witnessing different forms of wildlife at every turn. with so little human interaction, we were able to focus our senses on all that was around us. i think we were most impressed with how the jungle's sounds change so predictably and dramatically throughout the day. the day begins at around 4:30am when the howler monkeys (and, therefore, anything within a 2Km radius) wake up and say hello to each other. this is followed at around 5:30am by the thousands of parrots gathering for their morning tea and crumpets. the daylight hours are a constant source of entertainment with thousands of bird chirps and monkey calls-- then as the sun sets, there is a rather dramatic shift as the nocturnals emerge and the jungle becomes a cacophony of insects and amphibians making love. apparently they're all screamers.

i have no idea how or where to start when describing this experience. i suppose i can start by saying that you hafta just go to really capture what it's like. if you're into nature and wildlife, you really hafta just go. that being said, there were a few highlights and lowlights: two hours from the end of the long hike as we entered on day 1, roger (our guide) turned his ankle pretty nastily. i thought it was gonna ruin the trip, but fortunately continual high-dose aspirin allowed for him to deal with it throughout. worse than the trauma was his 24-hr incapacitation with some virus that came very close to dramatically affecting everyone in the park. his condition was so bad (clammier. more pale.) that there were whispers by the park rangers that the government wanted him airlifted outta there with the rest of us quarantined until they could rule out swine flu. fortunately, he endured and was back to baseline the next day. thank god, cuz getting outta there just ash and me could've led to some fairly important problems- getting lost being right at the top of that list. on the day the three of us left the park, a branch poked roger solid in the eyeball (¨veo negro! veo negro!¨) and he re-injured the ankle. needless to say, he canceled his next several days of work, probably to assess why god is so pissed at him.

so, the animals. we are thrilled at the diversity we were able to witness with our own eyes. my favorite animals (next to wolves) are the big cats, so naturally they were at the top of my personal wish list. on our second night in the park, we took a hike armed with only a flashlight looking mostly for bats, insects, alligators and frogs. imagine the jolt when reflecting back at us, no more than 15 feet away behind some brush, was light bouncing directly off of a puma's retinas. the emotions felt upon seeing those eyes glowing from such a short distance in the dark wild is very difficult to put into words. it moved slightly, showing off the beautiful frame that was its head before sneaking off silently in another direction. breathtaking. while the jaguar proved once again to be too elusive, we did lay eyes on two other animals at the tops of their respective food chains: crocodiles and bull sharks. both were located at the mouth of the sirena river as it dumped into the pacific. less inviting waters for a swim, those.

by far the most frightened i personally got during the trek, however, was when we came face to face with a troop of white-lipped peccaries (similar to wild boar) as they crossed our trail just ahead of us. these are the more aggressive of the two species of peccary found in the park; some males of the gang will attack whatever they feel may be threatening rather than run from it. i got slightly too caught up in the photography for a moment as i realized that not only was one charging at me and grunting, but that my guide was 15 feet behind me with ashley and i was armed with only my camera. while i did manage to keep from urinating myself, i had a legitimate quarter second of terror before making my mad dash for safety. fortunately, this particular charge was only a bluff. apparently, one sorry dude last year didn't reckanize and kept filming; he left the park with one fewer patella than he had upon entering. nasty.

on our last day as we exited the park (a 20K hike along some incredibly pristine tropical black-sand beaches, completely uninhabited), we saw the only species of monkey in costa rica that we hadn't yet seen-- the white-faced cappucin. if you've seen the movie outbreak, it's that kinda monkey (which is actually impossible since outbreak took place in africa, but whatever). we sat and watched them interacting just like a very well-functioning family of humans: sharing fruit and caressing each other gingerly. i mentioned to my guide that i felt like of the four species, these were my favorite. he cringed and mentioned that while they appeared cute right then, they can be very mean-- they'll eat anything they can steal: eggs out of a nest, other types of animals, etc). i didn't like the sound of that and reviewed the other species in my head to find a new favorite, then i considered my own previous three meals and suddenly empathized more with my new friends. they're very cute.

it's obviously against the law for anyone to leave the park with any of the animals, so i'm glad i wasn't caught with a pet that i discovered i had kept for myself the next day. i felt a bump on my right calf that i hadn't noticed and saw that a tick had managed to hang on tightly enough as i walked by a day earlier. i named him grody. not very pleasant to look at, but with ashley's help he was out a minute later with (thus far) no ill effects. fortunately, aside from a few scattered mosquito bites, it was our only unfavorable insect encouter.

this post could truly go on and on with stories and sightings, but in the interest of time and sleepiness i'll stop for now. ash will post a slightly different take in a couple days. again, the moral of the story is that if you're into the outdoors, get a rush outta hiking around an area where you're by no means at the top of the food chain, and don't mind sweating a lot, you hafta get yourself to corcovado. you'll come out slightly different.

alright then,
pura vida.

congrats all around...

after eight bumpy hours in the baaaaaaack of a bus, david and i have finally reached the somehow simultaneously sleepy and hoppin town (read, two blocks) that is puerto jimenez. we're about to hit the sack as we disappear into the jungle at 5am tomorrow, but a few things of note are going down that deserve some props before we do so...

first, around hour 6 of our bus ride today, david gave me the green light on, if i choose to do so, calling him 'doctor' the rest of the trip. and the rest of our lives. that's right...kidding aside, today david is officially a doctor! i know i am in good company when i say i could not be more proud--he earned it and will bring much to any er lucky enough to have him.

also much deserving congrats is the official union of david's cousin evelyn to her awesome fiancee (tomorrow, husband) dana. we are uttterly bummed to be missing out on the austin festivities, but we are thinking of you guys...wish we could be there!

provided we aren't eaten or otherwise maimed, we'll update in a few days on what promises to be a life altering experience...