If you ever want to go to Parismina, which you do, it looks complicated, but isn’t*. I left Heredia around 6:30am and got to Parismina around 2pm, but there was a fair amount of time in that trip that I put there so I wouldn’t freak out about possibly missing connections.
There’s an orientation to the town, and then later an orientation to how the beach works, and then you do your first beach patrol that night at 8pm. The beach patrols are in the dark, on shifting sand, with only the light of the moon to guide you. There are areas of the beach where the sand is fairly well packed and flat, and areas where it’s loose and sloped and every step sinks your foot in. Because of that, a third of the time on that first night, I was thinking, wow, this is super easy, a third of the night I was thinking, this couldn’t be worse, and a third of the time I was thinking it wasn’t bad or good, and sure it could be worse: the beach could be rocky.
The middle third of the walk was the most consistently tough, mostly because time stretches endlessly when you’re so used to clocks to tell time by that you don’t know how to gauge the passage of time any other way.
The website says that you need to be in good shape to do these walks, but you don’t—you need to be in decent shape. The walking is on sloped sand, and in pretty heavy heat, but while we go at a decent clip, it’s not that fast. Especially if you’re in group one, which is the shorter patrol.
At the end of the night, I was drenched with sweat: my hair never dried from the shower I took that afternoon, and my clothes were soaked through because it was so humid and warm—although apparently it was better than the night before.
Just before we finished early, at 11:30pm, Joshua, our guide, stopped and smashed green coconuts on a log for each of us, so we could all drink the juice. The next night ants attacked him when we rested on the same log, and he said that somebody had obviously attracted them with all the coconuts laying about.
I got back to my homestay, took a cold shower, but it was still warm enough that the lack of heated water was a relief, and crashed. The end.
*Start at the Gran Caribe bus station in San Jose, and take a bus to Siquirres. I caught the 8:30 bus, which left me waiting in Siquerres for a couple hours, but Dugan and Kara, who I met as we got off the boat in Parismina, took the 9:30 bus and got to the old bus station with at least 15-20 minutes to spare. That may not be enough time if something goes wrong, but there is still another bus to Siquerres after the noon bus. The bus ride to Siquirres takes about two hours, but it’s on a comfy bus.
The bus lets you off in the new station, and you have to walk to the old station, about a block and a half to the right down the main street, and on the left, sorta hiding a bit. You can always ask someone which direction, too. The bus to Caño Blanco isn’t as comfy, and the road is dusty, so with the open windows, everything sort of ends up coated in a layer of dust. At Caño Blanco, the boats will be waiting to go to Parismina—they hold about 8-12 people, and if there are too many people, they’ll make multiple trips.
