A sleepy town with colonial roots dating back to the mid-1800s, Puerto Jiménez’s economy evolved from banana farms to gold mines. Its commercial district spans six blocks where dogs lie in the street and free-range chickens scratch in the dirt. Scarlet macaws—red, yellow, and blue–colored parrots the size of ravens—squawk overhead. There’s a hospital, a police station, an office for Cruz Roja (Costa Rican Red Cross). A Catholic church fills a city block–sized campus. Young men play soccer at a fenced-in field on the edge of town.

There is one gas station, two banks, a farmacia, maybe five bars, two supermarkets, and a hardware store. For tourists, there’s a surf shop, a handful of restaurants with English menus, shops with colorful toucans carved from wood, tour centers with grease boards announcing the day’s activities, and hostels that eagerly invite backpackers.

A block away, the gentle Golfo Dulce laps at a sandy beach that opens into a channel lined with mangroves where an occasional heron patiently fishes. Around the point, beginner surfers try their hand at a left-hand break. Beyond town, the dirt road bumps along for forty-five minutes to Matapalo, a diffuse beach community centered on the best surfing on the Osa. Another forty-five minutes past Matapalo, the road ends alongside a long paved airstrip at the village of Carate, on the opposite side of the Osa from Puerto Jiménez. Beyond is the most remote beach in Costa Rica, twelve short minutes from Panama by small plane.

On any given day, Ticos and Ticas—local Costa Ricans—saunter down Puerto Jiménez’s sidewalks, where they stop and gossip in greeting. Old cars and dusty SUVs pass each other with inches to spare. The ancestors of Puerto Jiménez included pirates and Indians, convicts and civil war rebels, squatters, gold miners, crocodile hunters, banana farmers, cattle ranchers, and those who fled San José’s crime and Nicaragua’s revolution.

Tourists—especially clean-cut, evenly tanned, lithe young men and women wearing flip-flops, tank tops, and sun hats—sit at open-air restaurants and page through their Lonely Planet guidebooks. Most come to the Osa to stay at an eco-lodge or to visit Corcovado National Park, considered the country’s crown jewel of conservation. Large by Central American standards, the park sprawls across 100,000 acres with big Amazonian animals to match: jaguars, tapirs, harpy eagles, crocodiles, bushmasters.

The Osa’s forests also hide poachers, illegal miners, drug smugglers, and murderers. At the north end of the peninsula in Sierpe, a small cowboy town in a mangrove estuary, two tons of cocaine were found in an underground cellar in 2016. In 2011, two North American women in their fifties were found murdered near Puerto Jiménez in separate incidents. In 2009, two Austrians in their sixties went missing from their blood-spattered house in Dos Brazos, a twenty-minute drive from Puerto Jiménez. Even Olaf Wessberg—the ex-pat Swede considered the father of Corcovado National Park—was murdered in the jungle near Puerto Jiménez in 1975.

WHEN ROMAN STEPPED off the long-distance bus into Puerto Jiménez’s sweltering heat on the afternoon of July 8, he knew none of this history of violence lurking just beyond the tourist billboards and hostels. But the Osa’s confluence of wild nature and dangerous people is not rare in Central America; nor was it new to Roman.

Sometime after four that afternoon, he checked into a place that his Lonely Planet guidebook called Cabinas the Corner Hostel. He wrote his name and passport number in the register.

On July 9, from an Internet café a block from his hostel, Roman emailed a friend: Currently on the Osa Peninsula on the Pacific, right next to Panama. There’s a national park I am going to sneak into and bushwhack around in. Practice for the Darien. He went on to say that he might cut his trip short. He needed to buy his ticket home, where he’d need an apartment, a car, a job, and pay for another semester of school. Costa Rica is burning through my cash. Otherwise, I wanted to see Colombia and climb some mountains and go trekking. I think South America is going to wait for another trip.

The same day, he sent detailed plans to Peggy and me in two emails. The first at 9: 02 AM said he was in Puerto Jiménez shopping for food to head into Corcovado. Five months before Roman arrived on the Osa, in February 2014, Corcovado National Park had enacted new regulations that required that all visitors who enter the park have a licensed guide. Roman had spent less than twelve hundred dollars a month since January. Even if he could fit a guide into his tight budget, he neither needed nor wanted one: Anyway, Im heading in offtrail tomorrow, just west of the Los Patos to Sirena trail. Its about 20km, then Ill hit the coast and follow the Madrigal trail out at night. I am going to try to follow the Rio David south, then hop over to the Rio Claro. . . . I anticipate the highlands to be slow and wet.

The highlands—where a maze of poacher and peccary trails crisscross a summit plateau cut by shallow canyons called Las Quebraditas—are indeed slow and wet. The plateau, officially off-limits to all but park guards, is notorious among miners and rangers alike as a disorienting landscape of rainy bamboo forests tangled in vines.

I am not sure how long it will take me, but Im planning on doing 4 days in the jungle and a day to walk out. 5km a day is an abysmal pace, but it’s hard to keep a straightline without a horizon. Ill be bounded by a trail to the west and the coast everywhere else, so it should be difficult to get lost forever.

Those final two words would haunt me for years.

Twenty minutes later, at 9:26 AM, he sent a link to the map that he would carry with him. Ok, I found what seems to be the best map yet. Ive been looking at a variety of other maps with rivers and trails in different places, with different names. He described a new plan: Im going to try and follow the Rio Conte up, then head south to Rio Claro, which he would follow to the coast and out to Carate. Its supposed to be the rainy season, so I dont know how passable these hills are. You know how steep and slippery this kind of terrain can be.

Then, of the $3,436 in his bank account, he withdrew 50,000 colónes—about $95—from an ATM a few blocks from his hostel. Across the street at the supermarket, he bought five days of food for just over $25. He cooked his dinner in the hostel’s kitchen, then spread his gear on his dormitory bed and divided it among his small yellow duffel bag, his big Mexican backpack, and his new pack.

Into the yellow bag he put his Lonely Planet guidebook, a spiral notebook, beach supplies, and clothes. Into his big Mexican backpack, he stored his Kelty tent, sleeping bag, Jetboil stove, puffy jacket, and other warm clothes he had used for climbing volcanos; his flip-flops, blue jeans, and belt; plus other clothes and another notebook. For his five-day trip into Corcovado, Roman filled his new pack with cooking and camping gear, food, a machete, topo map, compass, sleep clothes, Visqueen tarp, and mosquito-net tent.

On the morning of July 10 at the Cabinas Corners, he paid $20 to the little old lady who ran the hostel for his two nights spent in the dormitory and another $10 to reserve a bed for his return. He left the big Mexican pack and yellow bag in storage. At around noon, he crossed the street and caught a colectivo for $5 to Dos Brazos, a small village twenty minutes from Puerto Jiménez and located on the mountainous edge of Corcovado National Park.

Roman wasn’t headed for the Rio Conte after all—but told no one his new plans.

Dos Brazos means “two arms” in Spanish, referring to the two arms, or forks, of the Rio Tigre that come together there. The village’s three hundred miners, subsistence farmers, and their families live in simple homes along two short gravel roads, one along each river arm. At the junction is a pulperia, one of many small wooden shacks with sheet metal roofs that are sprinkled across the Osa. They sell snacks, drinks, and newspapers. This one sometimes buys gold from local miners.

Early in the afternoon of July 10, Roman climbed out of a colectivo across from the pulperia, shouldered his pack, and headed alone up the right arm of the Rio Tigre—El Tigre—into the jungle of Corcovado.

Part III

The southern half of the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. The distance between grid lines is six miles. The black star is the site of discovery. N.B. “Los Palmos” on north edge should read “Los Patos.”

Courtesy of the author

Chapter 20

“email, please!”

Paro Takstang Monestary, Bhutan, 2012.

Courtesy of the author