Into the Jungle
The day we’d been waiting for, the day when the real adventure would begin – our journey into the Costa Rican jungle. A journey that would end 6 hrs, yet just shy of only 40 kilometres later in Amubri, in the heart of the Talamanca Jungle: The homeland of the indigenous Bri Bri community.
Leaving first thing from Puerto Viejo on the southern Caribbean coast, carbed-up and raring to go, our bellies full of Pinto Gallo, we began the first leg of our journey into the jungle.
Loaded onto a mini-bus, the rear seats piled high with luggage passed hand to hand through a rear sliding window, we bounced along dirt tracks heading inland.
Leaving the town behind us, 14 pairs of shoulders and knees crashing and colliding as the wheels found every pothole, stopping at intervals to pick up random stragglers heading our way, we travelled west, following the course of the Sixiola river, along the border with Panama.
Heading deeper into increasingly dense vegetation, our route lined with immense banana and cacao plantations, gigantic palm trees skimming the sky, we arrived at our first, and absolutely crucial stop – the wellie shop; it was the middle of the rainy season after all!
So there we were, a couple of hours inland. The sunshine abandoned at the beach, the sky rapidly darkening, trawling through boxes of wellie-boots, giant fists of bright green coriander, baskets of avocados and sacks of rice spilling onto the roadside, as the first drops of rain began to fall.
Then it was time to hit the road for the second leg of our journey, to the small town of Suretka, on the banks of the Telire river.
A short while later, we pulled up onto an open expanse of dry riverbed, the river a couple of hundred metres ahead of us, and piled out onto the rocky ground. In the distance a long boat approached a wooden crate balanced on partially submerged rocks, to allow a motorbike, rider still astride, to disembark, the exhaust pipe glancing the surface of the water as he bounced out onto the shifting platform.
Swapping flip flops for wellies, throwing ponchos over our heads, a couple of sopping wet lads hoisted our luggage onto their shoulders, wading knee deep toward a waiting boat.
Sheltering from the increasingly heavy rain, the ticket sellers huddled behind cool boxes filled with jugs of bitter sweet tamarind juice, and tubs of freshly cut pineapple, neon packets of fried corn snacks stuffed into clear polythene sacks suspended from crossbars above their heads, we waited for another boat to arrive.
The luggage all loaded onto the first boat, the second boat pulled in, bobbing about in the choppy water as we balanced our way along raised narrow wooden planks into the bow, scooting our soon to be soggy bums along the wooden benches.
And we were off. The rain pelting our faces as we gathered speed, the sounds of the river breaking beneath us, the warm, heavy breeze and the smells of the saturated jungle filling our noses.
There I was, in the middle of the Rio Telire, the jungle in every direction, a member of the Hands with Heart team, with my new Osteopathy family, heading into the jungle to deliver free healthcare to as many children and their families as we could over the coming days. With so much ahead of us, so many things unknown – It was a totally amazing moment.
Then no sooner had we gained our ‘sea legs’ than we were disembarking onto the opposite bank. And there it was, our next transport vehicle. Parked nose down a 1:5 slope, parallel to the waters edge, leaning at a 45 degree angle toward the river, on an unstable, pebble surface.
Bags and team loaded onto the ancient charabanc, as the engine revved, the clutch slipped and the gears ground, I couldn’t help wondering if it would have been better if we’d walked up the hill to level ground, meeting the bus at the top of the incline.
But eventually we gained traction, inching backwards uphill, the fan belt screaming, the bus still angled sideways towards the river, all of us mentally dropping our centre of gravity, leaning away from the water’s edge as the brakes threatened to die, the phrase “he’s done this before” repeating over in my head until we reached the top. And then we were up.
As it would turn out, my initial negative appraisal of the capability of this particular bus wasn’t completely misplaced, when a couple of days later, the front axle would collapse under the strain, but that’s another story.
Over the next 40 minutes, covering only a handful of kilometres as we sputtered along, we passed brightly coloured clapboard houses interspersed with traditional open-sided stilt structures. The dirt road lined with cacao trees and date palms, piles of bananas heaped at the roadside, starfuit hanging like jewels.
Finally we reached our destination, and base camp for the next few days, the Koswak Lodge in Amubri.
Set in a clearing hacked out of the ancient jungle canopy, bright yellow lollipop plants and cerise orchids heavy with raindrops formed a pathway, our footfalls as we approached, muted on the leaf strewn ground.
A two-storey wooden building balanced on stilts above the jungle floor, topped with an enormous pyramid rush thatch roof, the lodge consisted of 12 bedrooms, wooden partitions and bamboo screens separating each from the next.
Open to the elements on 2 sides, my room for the next 5 nights contained 2 single beds, each with a thin mattress, a single pilllow, a blanket and a mozzie net, and nothing more. Knowing that we wouldn’t be returning to the lodge until after dark, the enormous and impressive thatch roof bare above our heads, (bat-city as it turned out), my roomie and I did a thorough creepy crawlie check (a new daily pre-bedtime ritual), quickly unravelling our nets and tucking them in very tightly underneath our mattresses, before any beasties had time to crawl in.
Outside the sleeping hut stood 2 small wooden structures for our daily ablutions, one for the girls, one for the boys. Each with a single centrally located bare bulb hanging from a corrugated metal sheet overhead, 2 toilet cubicles, 2 shower cubicles and a single sink.
It really was all extremely basic, and most definitely not for the faint-hearted, but what an amazing adventure it was shaping up to be!
