I should have stayed within the path… It was looking at me with forced indifference but with an underlying tension… Unable to move and stricken by an irrational laughter I kept sinking deeper and deeper.
It all started in yet another sunny day during our trip in Costa Rica. We were staying in a hotel in the middle of the mangroves of Tortuguero and, after seeing some turtles hatch the day before I was hooked. I needed to see more nature in a more wild scenario. It was perfect when a local guy offered to guide us through the jungle to see some wildlife in its truest habitat.
Manuel – that was his name – helped us into his boat and we started sailing up the river. He told us he knew the jungle very well because he used to be a poacher, but he quit and started working as a guide because he felt too guilty. After a few minutes of trying to decide if each floating branch was in fact a branch or yet another caiman, we arrived at the start of our trekking trail. Trekking trail is a big title, because there was just slightly more space between the plants rather than being anything manmade.
We started walking through the jungle and suddenly it was like being indoors. The trees felt like a wall and the canopy was a ceiling. The humidity was dense and so were the smells. And the sounds… there were so many sounds that it was hard to distinguish what was coming from where.
A tucan flew in front of us, nimbly avoiding the many lianas that were hanging from the rainforest’s canopy.
A red-eyed treefrog, the symbol of Costa Rica, lazily hanged from a leaf, as if it was feeling as the country’s flag.
A group of five mantled howler monkeys that were swinging from tree to tree stopped – both their swinging and their howling – and looked at us curiously. After a few seconds they continued their path.
This was just the beginning and, as a young biologist to be, it was too much for me in the best of ways. I couldn’t stop moving from side to side looking at every little animal or sculpture-like plant. Everything was so alive in the jungle, much more than in any forest I had been before. And nothing seem to care much that we, the outsiders, were wandering around.
In my frenzy of discoveries, I walked outside of the not-so-clear-trail and suddenly I was stuck. At first I did not understand what was happening, as I kept trying to move forward. It just seemed that the forest ground was lifting. Only it was the opposite. It was me that was sinking. In my cluelessness I stepped on quicksand and one of my friends was sinking as well not far from me.
One man in our group started to walk towards us to help us out, but the guide pushed him very hard, making him take a leap forward. He turned around confused and the guide yelled “Es una sincejas!” which roughly translates into “it’s a brow-less”. We were still confused. The guide then pointed at the floor and we saw a tiny snake rolled over itself right next to where we were. Manuel told us that this kind of snakes, the velvets, were very venomous and could kill us all in one quick attack, so we would have to move swiftly but without bothering it.
Photo credit: Brian Gratwicke with CC BY 2.0
For a while they struggled trying to lift us up from the quicksand while the snake kept looking at us and showing its forked tongue to smell us. Luckily, they eventually managed to bring us back up using some branches and the snake did not move much during the cumbersome opperation. In the end, it was nothing more than a scare, but it gave me a brief showcase of why the jungle is not a playground. It’s alive, it’s powerful, it’s dangerous and it’s dangerously beautiful. That is why I still cherish that experience as one of the best in my life.
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