Costa Rica day 6: the day we found tarmac

We awoke, as ever, before the alarm! The bleary sight of bodies emerging from sleeping bags in a cow shed will stick with me forever. After a false start where only fruit arrived, we had rice, beans, egg and wet toast.

I gave the shower a miss today, first time! But, after a cold night’s sleep, a cold shower would have been fatal. The toilet was blocked by a sleep-walking goer. This dismayed me as I needed to go. A ‘jungle poo’ seemed likely, gulp!

We put on our WET boots, loaded up our tortoise shells, applied sun block, insect spray and grabbed our sticks. It was a lot of downhill today, which is not as easy as you think, it kills your knees and the rocky path makes everything rather unstable!

I later had my ‘jungle poo’, with a slight technical difficulty. I later dried off.

We undulated through the countryside, plodding on, until the biggest b’stard of a hill! This was immense. In the baking heat, constantly rising, every time you reached a corner, you saw more hill. This was epic. Sam and I played the A-Z of buffet food to keep each other occupied. I sucked my platypus almost dry. This was hard. Thank god our lunch was waiting at the top!

A cow almost attacked Sue, we all struggled to take photos of this. We then descended more. Today, we walked for 6 and a half hours, average speed of 3.2km/hour. The descend took us through coffee and banana plantations, down and down, I stopped for more wee’s than anyone else.

Soon, we saw something odd. It was tarmac. I didn’t want to see this! Our remote jungle part was over, this was Santa Maria town. We strolled through the street like the mafia (Randall and Hector hid their machetes), expecting to be cheered. Didn’t people realise we’d been in the jungle, cut off for days?? No-one cheered.

The trek certainly wasn’t over, as we trekked through the town to our campsite, a community hall, where again we would sleep on the floor! We stopped at a coffee shop and got off our tits on espresso.

This was Hector’s last day, so I was urged to make a speech. I was naturally too shy, but did it nevertheless. I made reference to the fact he had such a huge vocabulary of animal noises, and walked further than anyone I’ve ever known to walk in wellington boots. Randall translated, but I’m not sure the full sentiment got across.

We later strolled back to the town to explore, we went into a Poundstretcher-esque where I toyed with buying an air bed. Oddly, we then joined a coffee factory tour, for hours! It was over-interesting. The girls told us off for being back late, and were convinced we had been in the pub.

We ate a traditional Costa Rican stew for dinner, and then had the most complex briefing ever, we had to re-pack our bags and it took hours (Sam a touch longer!)

Then, we went to the pub for real. It was twee, we were mostly transfixed by the random music TV channel. Once we bedded down in the community hall, I entertained the crowd (in my sleep) by farting, each time followed by a giggle. It was difficult to deny it had been me.