Camino de Costa Rica
Day 9: Palo Verde to El Empalme
Date: February 21, 2024
Miles: ~6.5
Time walking: ~4 hours. Started at 8:30am and finished at noon.
Difficulty: Elevation gain - 2818ft
7am breakfast - eggs, biscuits, tortillas, fruit. Three people weren’t feeling well today as they think they got food poisoning so transferred with the luggage instead of joining us. Rained all night loudly on the metal roof and continuing to downpour. A cold wet day.
Steep section to begin
Followed by up and downs. Including a couple of waterfalls
Last section steep to get to main road with beautiful views
Walked backward down busy main road to get to our accommodation. Staying in cabins tonight. Lunch at noon arrival - fish, vegetables, Yukon potatoes. Nice to warm up a bit.
Our cabin is large with a kitchen, main area with bed, table, and fireplace. Two additional bedrooms upstairs. Tried drying our clothes by the fire. Lots of afternoon sun pouring in our windows, and fully drying our clothes for the first time in four days. Fortunately we had hot showers again.
Afternoon to relax and fully warm up with the fire and sunshine. 6pm dinner - soup and rice. Helped to continue to keep us warm.
Day 10: El Empalme to San Pablo
Date: February 22, 2024
Miles: 13
Time walking: ~5 hours. Started at 8am and finished at 1:15pm
Difficulty: Elevation gain -1,457
Amazing sunrise view from our cabin doorway. 7am breakfast - scrambled eggs, fruit, big tortilla, rice and beans or toast
Unfortunately another team member went home today due to food poisoning and missing her kids. Our other 2 folks that also got food poisoning rallied and joined us today as they were feeling much better. So we are now down to 11 including our guide Ana.
Weather was great today. No rain and very pleasant temperatures. A chilly start quickly changed to crisp sunshine, then warm sunny by mid morning.
Rest of day was primarily downhill or gradual uphill. Mixture of paved road and gravel road with incredible views on both sides from our ridge line.
The foliage also changed to pine trees, oak, and less dense underbrush.
Tonight we are staying in a hotel. Feels like duplex cabins glued together without kitchens.
Hotel has a pool. Looked refreshing.
This is the biggest town we have been in to date. Some walked further to the main part of town, but we didn’t bother, and sounded like we didn’t miss much.
We had lunch around 3pm, which was delivered to the hotel. It was very good or maybe we were just super hungry. Dinner at hotel at 7pm. Full moon was nice.
