Ziplining in Monteverde

The next day in Monteverde was the day to which most people in the group were looking forward.  It was ziplining day in the Cloud Forest.  At least, I think it was the Cloud Forest.  We were told it was the Cloud Forest but I didn’t see many clouds.

As I stated in my prior post, I had to get up early and get ready for the adventure.  It took a 45-minute van ride to get to the area in which we were going to do the ziplining.  After getting our tickets, we got harnessed up and then went out to where the fun was to begin, where we received instructions on how not to die or lose any fingers.  Always good advice.

The ziplining consisted of thirteen platforms connected with steel cables at various heights and angles.  We were harnessed to the cables and just rode along at various speeds, depending on the angle of the lines, from platform to platform.  It was far from a high-impact workout, but some of the zips over the rainforest were pretty fun, especially the longer, faster trips.  I don’t have a particular fear of heights, though I do have a healthy respect for gravity.  The whole trip, however, was pretty fun and there was no real sense of danger at any point along the way.  (I wish I had photos to share but I was afraid to bring my camera and dropping it in the rainforest.)

At the very end of the ziplining, we had a Tarzan Swing.  Basically, this was getting harnessed onto a rope and holding on while jumping from a platform about 40-feet off the ground and then swinging until people at the bottom were able to stop you.  Generally, your body tells you that jumping from this height is a bad idea but once you’ve seen a few people do it, it’s difficult to be but so frightened.  As I swung across the forest and returned near the platform, all I could do is look at the person next in line and say, “Awesome.”

After the ziplining, a group of us did a walking tour of the park and the hanging bridges.  This was a little disappointing since there were very few photo opportunities.  There were a thousand shades of green in the rainforest but very little of any interest on the trek.  The hanging bridges were interesting, I suppose, but not particularly comfortable for me.

After the trek, we went out to a pizza place for lunch that had surprisingly good pizza and pasta (I had Pasta Mexicano) and then I returned to the hotel for a little nap.  That evening, a handful of us went for a night tour of the rainforest that was pretty fun.  The highlights for me had to be the armadillo and sloth that we were able to see during the walk, as well as a handful of tarantulas, though rather small tarantulas.  Unfortunately, again, there are no photos since my iPhone doesn’t really perform well at night.

After the walk, a few of us had dinner at a sushi restaurant and then went out for a few drinks.  Upon my return, I had another run-in with my English roommate (It’s always the fucking Englishmen!) and I went to the girls’ room with the “bad kids” for a few drinks, though not nearly as many as the night before.  I ended up crashing there again on the spare bed and getting up early again for our next trip, this time to La Fortuna.  I’ll pick it up there in the next entry.

Monteverde - Easy Come, Easy Go

After Ometepe Island it was time to move on to Costa Rica and Monteverde where I intended to test my boundaries. I ended up testing even more than that.

We left early, as we always seem to do, from Ometepe Island in order to catch a ferry and then a bus or two to the Costa Rican border. The trip was painless enough, though getting through Nicaraguan immigration was a little bit of a pain in the butt. To counter that, getting into Costa Rica was pretty freaking easy. It was so easy, in fact, that one of the people in our group got in without even getting her passport stamped. About thirty minutes after we left the border towards Monteverde, we were stopped by police who wanted to check our passports. The person in our group who didn’t have a Costa Rican entry stamp and a few random Dutch were forced off the bus in order to return to the border and go through the immigration process. Over the next half-hour, we ended up getting stopped two more times by the Costa Rican police for passport checks. It seems to me that they could save a lot of money and just check people’s passports at the border like every other country does, but who am I to say?

We arrived in Monteverde late in the afternoon and just hung around until it was time for dinner. We took cabs to a restaurant in a nearby town and I had a steak with chimichuri that just made me miss Argentina that much more. I also had my first Pilsen, which has turned out to be my favorite Costa Rican beer. After dinner, we went back to the hotel to drink because we still had quite a bit Flora de Caña rum leftover from Ometepe.

There was a table and some chairs outside of my room at the hotel, and it was still quite early, so the usual suspects gathered outside of my room to drink. At around 10:15 pm, one of my roommates, the Englishman – it’s ALWAYS the fucking Englishmen – came out to shout at us that we were too noisy and he was trying to sleep. Then he slammed the door. It didn’t quite close, so he had to come back to close it again. It didn’t help that he came out in his underwear and he is about 60 years old and 70 pounds overweight. This produced images that none of us will forget no matter how hard we try.

Being the nice people that we are, we moved the party into the girls’ room next door. Eventually, the “bad kids” left in the order in which they traditionally leave and two of us were left outside drinking and smoking cigarettes. As she was passing out, I saw one of my friends in an unconventional way (don’t worry that you don’t understand the reference – this is just to remind myself of the incident in the future) and the two remaining characters in this drama spent a few hours outside enjoying the rum and each other’s company.

Afterwards, instead of facing the wrath of my overweight-scantily clad-anger management needing roommate, I crashed in the girls’ room since they had an extra bed in there. After seeing some other things that I won’t soon forget and a quick game of Easy Come, Easy Go (again, probably not what you’re thinking but it’s still a reference I’ll remember in the future), I fell asleep around 3 am. We had a big day of ziplining the next day, so I had to get up at six and head over to my room to shower and get ready for that. That’s what I really wanted to write about regarding Monteverde, anyway, so I’ll get to that in the next post.

(It occurs to me as I write this that I probably have no photos to go along with this article. I’ll go ahead and apologize now and maybe I’ll just throw up some random photos from the trip to make up for it.)