Ordinarily, in Costa Rica the mornings are the clear and hot ones that you associate with tropical holiday resorts, and its only in the afternoons that the rain comes. But climbing Mt. Durika is an extraordinary experience.
Waking up to cloud and spitting rain doesn’t fill you with the same kind of enthusiasm and excitement that you would expect on such an expedition. But since when has that stopped a group of Durikan hikers. So we walked… and got very wet!
We started along a saddle that had once been an ancient burial site for the indigenous people. After this though, is what they call the ‘Green Wall’. Some of us found ourselves thinking that the graves were actually from those who had died trying to climb the wall, because it is a 3hr scramble/ climb up an almost vertical wall. For a little more insight into the structure, you climb ----------meters in the space of ---------------. The trail isn’t so much a trail as a tapir’s tracks.
The jungle is extremely thick and Eugo effectively carved a new trail with his machete. Getting lost is a certainty, but with Nata and Eugo in your group, so is getting found again.To make things harder, it was rainy and very muddy. Devin’s description of it being more like the ‘Brown Slide’ as opposed to the Green Wall, sounded a lot more accurate.
When you ask anybody about the climb of Mt. Durika, all of them will talk about the Green Wall, but they never mention the walk after the wall to the campsite. When you’ve finished the wall you are around half way and you still have a long way to go. Although the Wall is much harder physically, mentally the next bit is much tougher. You never seem to be getting any closer and there are no indications as to how much further there is to go. Everywhere looks the same! You have to climb over fallen trees or thick, high roots, or crawl under low hanging branches or even high thick high roots, all with a big rucksack on.
Needless to say, the flat area we called our campsite, which looked no different to anywhere else, had never looked so inviting.
The tarp was soon up and we began the laborious process of peeling our wet clothes from our shivering bodies. But we had done it. The final ascent up to the summit was only 200 meters from the camp and the summit itself was within 2hrs hiking. Having said that, we had to take the GPS’s word for it because we couldn’t see 20 meters, let alone 200.
But a mug of instant coffee and a block of fudge had us all in good spirits.
As you may know from you own camping experiences, but there isn’t a great deal to do other than sleep when it gets dark, so through out the 5 days we were up at 5 and in bed at 6. I say in bed as opposed to asleep for reasons such as that mentioned in the 1st day, or the fact that your mattress is 1cm thick and prevents you from ever getting comfortable.
Not only that, but rain falling onto a tarp sounds like rain falling on the roof of a conservatory. So it could just be spitting but sound like a torrential down pour to us sitting underneath. However, the rain did have its uses.
Although it didn’t help our clothes dry which were hanging outside, it did allow us to get water. There are no good water sources by the camp so you simply place pans and mugs in strategic places to catch the murky water. Yummy!!!
Snuggling into our sleeping bags we hoped that the rain would abate for tomorrow’s final ascent.
