Google map: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=pt-PT&q=Cerro+Chirrip%C3%B3,+Costa+Rica&sll=8.55,-83.583333&sspn=0.010397,0.013733&ie=UTF8&cd=1&geocode=FTO3kAAdZRAG-w&split=0&ll=9.001739,-83.207703&spn=1.264118,2.801514&z=9
5km below Everest… but higher up than anyone else in Central America – south of Guatemala that is. No swine flu here. ;-)
This is Cerro Chirripó, and it takes you a 20km hike up the mountain, with an average slope of around 10%, to get there. It’s a very hard walk, but I think I’m starting to get addicted to these…
I had to spend the night in a mountain refuge, 6km below the summit. Which meant using a rented sleeping bag (yeah, high on hygiene…) and eating nothing but canned tuna and jam for 2 days. Tasty.
I was lucky enough to avoid strong rain – just a couple of hours of “normal” rain while going up, and another 2 hours while coming down. Not too bad… But since the soil was really muddy and the hike really steep, my muscles and feet are still hurting from the climb. I was dead tired when I came back. 100% exhausted.
It’s one of those classic examples of an enterprise you regret the all time having gotten yourself into it, so painful it is, but then at the end you look back at it with a smile, and you think it was worth it.
It really was. Not only because of the views offered by the hike, but also because of the bus ride from Puerto Jiménez (where I was before) to San Isidro (the major town closest to Chirripó), and then to San Gerardo de Rivas (just Rivas, in the Google map, and the very small village from where you depart to hike to the summit). From Palmar Sur to Buenos Aires (not, not the Argentinean one – check the Google map) you follow the valley of river General, which has intense and bright-green rice (I think!) plantations surrounded by beautiful tree-rich hills that reminded me yet again of South East Asia.
That journey is a good example of how different Costa Rica is from Guatemala or Honduras, for instance, where totally deforested mountains are common place. Here, a lot of the forest is protected, either in natural parks or in private property, whose owners are paid a rent by the government in order not to touch their land – don’t build, don’t cultivate: just leave it as is. By the way, that’s why I don’t mind at all paying $10 a day to enter the national parks in Costa Rica – rather $10 here, where I expect them to be more or less well spent, than elsewhere.
Ah! Another good think about the climb to Cerro Chirripó: it was almost tourist-free, with most of the 10 or so climbers who were with me at the mountain refugee being Costa-Rican. That’s nice, isn’t it?
I found this "little" bird just by the lodge I was staying in San Gerardo de Rivas
The landscape changes a lot, as you go up. Deep green humid forest in the 1500-2500m range (see above) changes higher up into a much more arid mountain (see below)_
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New boots. My sneakers were left behind in a bus station in San Isidro. They were in really bad shape and had been wet for 4 days, since my hike in Corcovado. I hope no one was desperate enough to recover them! 
The summit
The gnome was there too (yes, you have to love these morons who leave their names everywhere)_
The view from the top: clear from the North and West (Pacific coast); really cloudy (and foggy!) from South and East (Caribbean coast)
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