The Cubecer, Tsumari Village

After nearly a week of deliberation and thought, I am finding it less and less important to detail all the moments of our week-long excursion to the Costa Rican Indigenous reservation. The idea of scripting pages upon pages of detail bores me to high hell. Despite the few gems of information that would be contained in such a walden-esque tale, (like walden-or any of the last 20 movies I've seen) most potential readers give up 3 sentences in.

That said, here's the trip in a nut shell:
We left on Monday 26th Oct, 2009, for a 3 day, 2 night trip to the Tsumari village within the Cubecer reservation in the Cartago Provence. Our goals: to meet the indigenous, bring them donations and have a little cultural exchange. Our guide: a 30-something Tico elementary school teacher, Jorge. Jorge ventures to the Tsumari village weekly to provide school lessons for the indigenous children; he makes the weekly journey in 3-4 hours. Backpacks loaded with some 30-40lb of donations for the village, our expected 4-5 hour hike crept to 10 hours with the last hours encroaching into darkness.

Over the10 hour hike we covered approximately 7-8 miles, 6000 ft of elevation(each way) 4 rivers numerous creeks and 3 hours of rain. Oh and did I mention it took 10 hours? We traversed dry rocky man-made trails; swamp-like mud; small patches of quicksand; extremely narrow ravines; single-wide-log bridges over rivers; passes large enough for a single footing; and waterfalls(which were climbed both up and down). The hike was strenuous, to say the least. There were definately points where I felt like laying down and giving up. "The jaguars will find me soon enough", and "where did my legs go?" were common thoughts.

After our 10 hour ascent to the Tsumari village our drenched zombie-like bodies we were welcomed by total darkness, many hours of rain, small biting insects, rambunctious pigs and Jorge's very full 15 x 15 school house with just enough room for two small hard wooden "beds" to share (between the four of us - Tiffany, Jorge, Lucia and myself) and our packs to fit very "cozily".

The sun came up at 5 am, as it does every day here in Costa Rica, though our limp bodies remained cacooned in sleeping bags for the better part of the day. Around 10am we arose to review or battle wounds - blisters and sores from the rubber boots; scrapes and scratches from various branches rocks and falls; and our many insect bites scratched raw through out the night and morning. We definately needed the rest and just one day wasn't going to do it. We very quickly decided that we would stay with Jorge until his return trip on Friday.

The rest of our stay was very laid back with LOTS of time for much needed R&R. The kids came to school for a few hours each day which gave us an opportunity to interact with them. They're about as fluent in Spanish as I am (if you can call a 20 word vocabulary anything close to fluent) so there were more hand gestures facial expressions than talking though we were able to communicate fairly well. The topics of 'discussion' were "how to brush one's teeth" (using the donated brushes we packed in), the large quantities of guava trees, which donations for which child, and an art lesson put together by Tiffany on how to make a parrot, pig or flower using stencils, glue and construction paper!

My observations of the village throughout the week seemed to support what I've heard - that the indigenous diet is predominantly government issued rice and beans (because they don't grow any on the reservation) which are brought in on foot by the indigenous. The rice and beans are supplemented with plantains, banana, chyote and guava which grow very well at the altitude of the village. The homes are more often than not, shacks with earthen floors. The beds are their second pair of clothes and their rubber boots are torn to shreds. They have no art (basket making, totems/statues, painting, drawing, architecture etc.).

Our return trip went much smoother and was far faster (7 hours) than the ascent due in a part to the downhill nature and the absence of about 90% of the pack weight (the donations). The whole experience was rather humbling and gives me great respect for the hardships that are undertaken daily by the Costa Rica's Indigenous population. All in all I'm glad I did it, though It'll never happen again (as of a week later my feet still have not recovered).