Today we had a nice relaxing day without too much adventure planned. Since we have a pretty long day of hiking Corcovado National Park tomorrow, we decided to take it easy today. First we enjoyed a nice breakfast at our hotel with beautiful views of the beach right from our table.
The resort has a nice pool and hot tub, and the entire grounds are set within a pretty secluded forest. We ended up having the entire pool to ourselves today, so we spent some time cooling off on this hot and humid day.
For our hike tomorrow, we ended up booking a day hike tour out of La Leona Ranger Station within Corcovado National Park through Corcovado Hiking Tours (owned by a tour guide named Rodolfo). There are few different hiking options and tour companies, so do some research and choose the one that suits your needs. They range from day trips out of La Leona Ranger Station (long drive and extended hiking) or Sirena Ranger Station (long boat ride and less hiking), but you can even do multi-day trips! They offer 2-day, 1-night trips and even 3-day, 2-night trips. The catch is you can only stay at the ranger stations, so most of these options require advance reservation. Since we have our own 4×4 vehicle, we opted for the La Leona day trip, which costs $75pp ($60 for the tour and $15 for the national park entrance fee).
We met up with Rodolfo to finalize payment and receive some last-minute tips for our all-day hike tomorrow. The plan is to meet him at Panaderia Monar (bakery) around 5:15am to grab some pastries and coffee for breakfast, as well as sandwiches for our lunch during the hike. This local panaderia actually opens at 4am and caters to most of the hikers and local guides. He said that we’d get on the road right at 5:30am to begin our journey to the national park, which would take about 2 hours along an unpaved road with a few river crossings. We’d actually only drive to the town of Carate, and would then hike approximately 3.5 km to La Leona Ranger Station and enter the secondary forest of Corcovado National Park. After exploring all that Corcovado has to offer, we’d return to Puerto Jimenez around 5pm.
We worked up an appetite by the time we were done meeting with Rodolfo, so we decided to grab a bite to eat at PizzaMail.It for some delicious pizza.
After dinner, we made our way back to our hotel to get to bed early…if tomorrow is anything like what Rodolfo said, then we’ll definitely need every minute of rest we can get! Stay posted for tomorrow’s jungle adventure!
Sounds like fun!