If you swear in the forest and there are people to hear it...

We're onto week three and we've had our second weekend of free time. I'll quickly cover the week day business.

This whole working Monday to Friday 9-5 is weird! While we may not be 'working' we're actually quite busy! We wake up and have breakfast with the Tico family, then walk down to Maximo for Spanish classes with La Professora Anna. We spend two hours in class, then head down to our usual cupcake meeting. After that Hayley and I would jump on a bus for an hour trip each way to our project, finish around 5 for the return to Maximo, pick up some of our Tico family then head home. While it doesn't sound like much it's really made me appreciate the weekend!

This brings me to the new business! Adventure time! 

So this weekend which just passed we decided to do a little adventuring while some of our Tico family were living it up USA style at an all inclusive resort with yes, other Americans (Nimit you're still cool don't worry).

Saturday morning we grabbed the shuttle and heading around an hour South East of San Jose, outside of a town called Cartargo to go white water rafting. After around 10 minutes of safety instructions in broken english (arm waving and laughing gets the point across right..right..) we jumped in! I've never been rafting before so the technique of shoving your foot as far under the set in front of you as possible was refined as much as possible before the first rapid.

Cries of right side forward, left side backwads, adelante, backwards, all in and "OH MY GAWD" from the back of the boat, the occasional spanish phrases made the morning very interesing.

I've uploaded the photos to facebook so if you're a friend jump on and check it out.

After our little rafting session they provided us with lunch, a traitional lunch plate called a casado (a mixture of gallo pinto-rice and beans with chicken and salad with your own addition of hot sauce) with a fantastic juice which I feel like they picked the ingredients at random. After we'd finished lunch it was back on the bus to zip lining!

For those that have never heard of zip lining (for god sake what's wrong with you, I recommend you try spending time outside of your house) it's basically being put into a harness, attached to a cable then 'flying' through the air from point to point. This reliance on gravity general requires you to start somewhere high and zip line down. There's only one problem with this concept, the bus only takes you half way up the mountain!

Our group consisted of four members of the Tico family, a group of 3 volunteers (one of which will be refered to as the Columban douchebag or CDB) and a mum, dad and little girl. Half way up the trek one of the other vlunteers starts huffing and slowing the group down. The nice people that we are decided rather than help him up the hill we'd over take him and step up the pace. After around 15min of walking we get to the top and start gearing up.

After yet another safety briefing in broken english (this one was a little better), the main points turned out to be;

1. You have to break yourself
2. Don't put your hand in front of the 'pully'
3. Don't fall off the mountain

We ended up trying 14 different cables ranging in length from "why even bother" to "where the hell is the other platform?!" The views were pretty impressive from surrounded by jungle to jungle 20-30m below you and a view of the surrounding cities. I'd recommend the adventure to pretty much every body.

There was a little surprise about 2/3 of the way through, we all ziplined to a platform basically made out of wire and suspended in an enourmous tree (you could peer down to what could be your death). After some of us may have decided to 'bounce' a little at the direction of the guide (much to the dislike of one girl) the guides hooked us up one by one and belayed us to the ground. It was a tranquil slow ride to the ground, allowing you to view the surrounding canopy and trees. Unfortunately for me I was the last of our group and unknown to me my 'friends' had been in discussions with the guide at the bottom of the tree. I guess the video says more than I could type...

We boarded the bus soon after this and headed home. Sunday was a little more sedate exploring a nearby town called Cartago. I wont write a blog post about Cartago except that it used to be the capital city however due to volcanic earthquakes regularly anihilating the place they decided to move the capital (good idea).

Take care guys.

-Stew