A Post Named Sue

I don’t know what to call this post. Into the Wild? Beach in My Shoe? A Dream Fulfilled? I can’t decide, so I’ll call it “Sue.”

This will be a very long entry because today was a very long day. It is one about which I have been anxious for quite a while, on account of I didn’t know if I’d live through it. Keep reading to find out if I did.

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A confused rooster starting crowing at 2:00 a.m., joined by an amigo two hours later. Forty minutes after that the first of my three cellphone alarms got me out of bed. Cold shower. Packed my backpack in the dark. Needed something from the bottom of the pack. Unpacked. Repacked.

At 5:15 Jill arrived and we walked along the town’s dark, dirt roads to the “bus station,” a café that was already hopping by the time we got there.

At 6:00 the colectivos arrived, and people climbed aboard so quickly that the three of us couldn’t fit on the same one. Mine had bare wooden benches and metal rods. Jill and Lewis happened onto one with padded seats.

As the sun rose we jostled along dirt roads through flat fields broken by the occasional towering, mushroom-domed tree, and across half a dozen streams, some muffler-deep. These pictures are blurry from motion but I like them.

After an hour of farmland we entered a tunnel of rainforest where blue morphos bounced erratically like toys on a stick. Finally, around 8:30, we reached Carate, which as far as I could see consists of only one building. Shouldered our heavy packs and launched onto the beach.

Man, was this a hard hike. Though neither steep nor high, it was long (almost 20 kilometers) and excruciatingly hot. About a third of it was on the beach in full, withering sun through soft sand and over rocks, in air so still and thick I felt like I was breathing underwater. I was afraid I’d collapse in a humiliated heap.

The wooded parts were kinder, though the bed of roots and rocks made walking treacherous. Like that one time: there I was, minding my own business, when a nomadic vine leapt out and looped around my toe, sending me face first into the foliage, driven into the yielding earth by 30 pounds of pack. I lay there all twisted, arms and legs waggling uselessly, until I finally rocked my way back to a mobile position. Jill and Lewis never noticed my temporary absence. The shrill of the insects drowned out the gentle sound of swearing.

But the good stuff about the terrain”¦ it was stunning. Bananas and crimson flowers and coconuts and curlicue vine tendrils. Giant leaves and secret streams. Brilliant butterflies and cicadas so loud they make their West Virginia cousins seem timid.

And the larger wildlife”¦ without Jill and Lewis I would have walked right by it. Many creatures of the rainforest have absurdly long noses, like the coatis we passed.

At one point I smelled a barnyard odor and wondered if we’d stumbled into a patch of peccaries. The next second, at Lewis’ alert, I saw one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, something I’ve actively looked for all my life.

At that moment I thought that all the hard walking was as nothing compared to the wonder of seeing a puma. (I changed my tune a few grueling kilometers later, in melting heat and deep sand and rain.)

A while later we smelled something truly foul, and heard splashing and grunting. Five minutes later we got a fleeting glimpse of a herd of white-lipped peccaries.

To my intense frustration, I learned that my cameras aren’t designed for this kind of situation. At the moment of truth, when I have milliseconds to act, they invariably go on strike and refuse to focus. In every wild animal shot from here on, you’ll see the bad result.

My skill, apparently, is in spotting every imaginable variation of this life form:

By 15 kilometers I had blisters from toe to sole and I was staggering, but I’m pretty sure I never whined or complained, and didn’t ask “are we there yet” more a dozen times a mile. And as for my companions: they were cheerful and encouraging at every step. That’s very rare.

When we reached our last river crossing we were too tired to remove our hiking boots. The ton of sand in each boot absorbed the water, which squoodged with every step.

We rounded a final corner and spotted Sirena Ranger Station in the distance. As we trudged the last kilometer the rain resumed. Seconds after we climbed into the shelter of the porch it began to full-on pour.

Once we got settled — me in my dorm room (which luckily I didn’t have to share with some stranger) and they in their tent — we decided to take another night walk. I could barely operate my legs, but we wandered around in the dark for an hour. I found my first snake and my first tree frog. They found all kinds of things, like sleeping butterflies.

It wasn’t long till we, too, were sleeping like butterflies.

Next Central America entry >>

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