Corcovado National Park

[dima]

Sondra and I just went to Costa Rica to walk around in the jungle and to climb a mountain. I've been wanting to see a Tapir, so we went to the jungliest place we could find: Corcovado national park on the Osa peninsula. As a national park there are lots of rules about what you can do, and how you can do it: you need a guide, you can only go to certain places at certain times, you can only sleep at the lodges, you can only eat their food, etc, etc. So this is somewhat glampy/gliky, but whatever.

We took a boat from Bahia Drake to the Sirena station, spent the night, and took a boat back the following day. As soon as we landed on the beach at Sirena, a Tapir came by, took a massive shit in front of us, and walked off. Everyone was impressed.





This set the tone for the next two days. There're animals everywhere, and they don't care at all about the humans. There are peccaries (collared and white-lipped)







Monkeys (spider, howler, squirrel); didn't see any capuchins, but they're there





Various snakes



Countless birds







Coatis





And countless other things that I didn't photograph (sloths, crocs, agoutis and so on). Some things are more common then others: our guide was excited to find a Tayra and a King Vulture. We spent days like this:



This was super cool. It's a rainforest, so you potentially can get soaked, and there's mud everywhere. We got pretty lucky, though: it only rained hard at night, and the rain mostly stopped when we went out to look for stuff. You pay $$$ to come here, but there's a lot to see. Recommended!

[Sean]

Thanks for the report! I hope you took a picture of tapir poop.

[dima]

Regretfully, I did not. This was before the check-in at the park, and wandering off even a little bit to check out the poop may have been frowned-upon.

[HikeUp]

Nice trip! Thanks for the pictures.

Costa Rica is one of the ultimate birder destinations. The woodpecker looks like a Paled-billed Woodpecker. The other two - I dunno...yet.

[dima]

There were lots of different birds. I didn't take photos of most of them, or remember their names. It's definitely a good place to go if you're into that.