We started hiking around the easy trail first and just as you enter the trail you already feel lost from the rest of the world. The rainforest is so thick that you can hardly see anything off the path itself. The walking trail is crisscrossed by flowing streams and lines of leafcutter ants, interrupted occasionally by huge trees and their mammoth roots. Walking a little further we came to a large waterfall and further still we began to see a series of sulphur springs, shown in the photo below, with boiling mud and plenty of steam. It reminded me a little of yellowstone park, except the tropical version. We passed some wild monkeys and a few more sulphurous thingys and we easily finished the first part of the trip.
Next, we headed to the longer hike to a huge waterfall on the other side of the park. We walked through more thick rainforest, past a swimming hole and then all of a sudden, for no reason at all, the rainforest turned into a cactused savannah with knee-high grass and small shrubberies (yay!) , and then again, without warning, it went back to rainforest. It repeated this a couple of more times, completely changing ecosystems within a couple of meters.
We finally got to our waterfall where we had planned to swim and have our lunch. We carefully took out our bottle of rosé wine and tucket it between two rocks in the stream to cool it down. And thats when the real adventure started. No sooner had we pulled out our bread and started to spread our peanut butter than a huge tropical downpour broke out, which naturally sent us running everywhere to try to get out of the rain, only to realize that there was nowhere to run.
We resigned ourselves to the wet, and taking off our shirts and hiding them under a rock we opened our bottle of wine and ate our sandwiches under the rain. I pulled out my tiny travel umbrella and me and Charles huddled under that, trembling, taking turns eating our sandwiches and drinking our excellent Chilean wine, all while cursing the deluge.
So we huddled and huddled until all the wine, sandwiches, and olives (mmm...olives) were gone. Then we decided to make our way back to the ranger station because our van back to the hotel was leaving soon... so we made a last futile attempt to remain dry by zipping ourselves in our kay-ways and heading off. So we trudged back half-drunk and wet to the bone (socks and underwear included) splashing our way through the mud tracks and wiping the raindrops from our eyes. Apparently alcohol helps hiking because we got back in half the time, and with hardly any effort at all.
We did take, however, the mandatory swimming break in a natural pool on the way back, with freezing water and waterfalls around us, it was exactly what we needed after a day of hiking. When we did get back to the ranger station the whole park had been engulfed by clouds, making it look surreal. An hour of wet van and we were back in our hotel, showered and ready to continue on to the capital, where we would arrive at midnight and leave at 4 am for the carribean coast.
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