Me and the other zip lining volunteers
We were zip lining through such beautiful forests!
On the Tarzan Swing!
It’s been a
few days since I’ve made a blog post, because the past few days have been full
of doing other things, like working on enclosures here at the center and
exploring other areas of this country! Yesterday, I took my second day off
since starting here, to go explore La Fortuna with some other volunteers. La
Fortuna is the town around the Arenal volcano and is one of the biggest tourist
destinations in Costa Rica, and probably all of Central America. I actually
have a big, all day long tour of Arenal already booked for the tenth, but that
tour doesn’t include zip lining, which is one of the main things I wanted to do
here, so when I heard some other volunteers say they were getting a group
together to go zip lining in La Fortuna, I jumped on board!
After making
sure my camera was fully charged, packing up a little day bag, and going to bed
early Wednesday night, myself and seven other volunteers were picked up by
Johnny, one of the center’s drivers, at six am yesterday, and we hit the road
to La Fortuna! The volunteers consisted of six girls and two guys- me and two
other Americans, a girl from Germany, a girl from Australia, a guy from Norway,
and two girls from the UK. At a little after eight, we stopped at a restaurant
to eat breakfast right across the street from where the zip lining tour
started. Out of the eight of us, only five were doing the zip lining- the other
three would spend that time hiking around the area. The zip lining tour lasted
about two hours and consisted of twelve lines, including a very long, very high
one at the very end! I could definitely feel my adrenaline pumping when the
tour was getting started, and I knew some of the other volunteers felt it too!
After the first line, which was a pretty short starter one, we all relaxed and
saw that it really wasn’t scary.
About
halfway through the tour, we stopped at a line the guides called the Tarzan
Swing. Instead of being a typical zip line that you just zip across, this line
was a swing! The guides clipped us onto the line one at a time, gave us a push,
and we swung out across the top of the rainforest, enjoying a beautiful view of
the trees and river as we flew along. That was probably all of our favorite
line on the whole tour- either that or the final line.
The guides
told us from the beginning that the last line was the longest, highest, and
fastest. Before going on that one, we were fitted into a different type of
harness than the one we’d been wearing up to that point. The new one was a full
body harness that attached to the line in two places and allowed us to lie out,
head first, as we zipped across the line. The final line was 300 feet high, 552
meters long, and took 45 seconds to zip all the way across- it was really fast!
The fact that we were lying out face first along the line meant that we had a
perfect view of the greenery that we were flying over!
It was about
11:30 when the tour ended, and we piled back in the shuttle to continue our way
to Arenal. After about another half hour on the road we stopped at the stop where
a lot of the Arenal hikes start. After paying a small fee to get into the park,
being given a map and having a guide explain some of the routes, the eight
volunteers filled up our water bottles and headed out! The hike was long,
pretty strenuous, and absolutely beautiful! The guide at the park entrance
explained that we were hiking through what was called a transitional forest- a
mix between a rainforest and a cloud forest. It was very warm and humid all
throughout the afternoon, and it rained on us for just a little while, but most
of us had rain jackets and it wasn’t raining very hard, so it was fine. I saw
my first wild eyelash viper up in the trees on that hike, as well as a lot of
really pretty birds.
After a
couple of hours of hiking, we found our way back to the front of the park and
got back into the shuttle. The last thing we wanted to do before heading back
to the center was go relax in the hot river at La Fortuna. There are hot
springs around Arenal that you can pay to go to, but for free you can also go
hang out in a river of very warm, super relaxing water, which is what we chose
to do. After that strenuous hike, the warm water felt so nice! We hung out in
there for about another hour before heading back to the center, stopping for
dinner on the way.
Here at the
center today it’s been another busy day of enrichment work, but I think this
blog post is long enough, so I’ll end it here. This post’s food for thought is
a quote that I was reminded of on the hike yesterday, when we went off the path
for a while and nearly got ourselves lost, but came upon some really beautiful
scenery in doing so: “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where
there is no path and leave a trail.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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