The Good Stuff

Remember the ziplines? Post #1, January 20th, "First Steps," crazy justification for going to Costa Rica? Yeah, that.

Guess what!

I did it!

Over a week ago, actually, but unfortunately I had neither the energy nor the mindset to properly describe the amazing experience right after I had it. I was fully occupied with blowing my nose, sneezing, sleeping, running to every pharmacy in Heredia and whining about it. But now I'm back.

So the story goes... as bookends to my crummy week of sickness, I had, what may be, two of my favorite experiences in Costa Rica. Last weekend I found myself (finally!) in the mountains of Monteverde with three compatriots from my Spanish class, sorting through the mountain of flyers, brochures, pamphlets, and trying to find the ideal zipline experience.

But first, a word about Monteverde: Monteverde is located to the north east of San Jose, reachable only by dirt roads (which its residents have fervently fought to keep from being paved) and is home to the Monteverde and Santa Elena Rainforest Reserves. These reserves protect the Monteverde cloud rainforest. Monteverde as a settlement was actually founded by a group of Quaker immigrants who settled and started making cheese. To this day, Monteverde dairy products are still some of the best in the country (if not the best) and the Quakers are still there, but apparently don't get out and about much.

The town itself lives almost purely off of tourism. It's a painful paradox, arriving in order to see some of the most beautiful, natural Tico landscape and being forced to buy into the huge tourism industry. On the other hand, it is precisely this tourism that keeps the reserves looking like forest instead of parking lots.

I felt kind of bad because I had come precisely to dribble my meager student budget into the coffers of tourism (some day I'll get over my distinct, largely irrational, loathing of this) but at the same time...ziplines! Your options for adventure activities in the Monteverde area are overwhelmingly numerous and range in price from "two hairs" to "arm, leg, neck and your first born child." All I can say is, thank goodness for student discounts.



After sifting through the options, myself and two of my friends finally settled on investing in a night hike and we managed to pick out which "canopy tour" company we wanted to go with. "Canopy tour" is a silly name. Zooming through the trees and across valleys on a cable is not a tour through the canopy. Worth the thirty bucks I paid? Definitely. Deserving of the lable placed on it? No.



The night hike was okay. We saw some glowing bugs, a great big tarantula, some sleeping birds... nothing that blew my mind but it was fun in it's way.



Ziplining was every bit as cool as I had anticipated. There were over 14 cables strung out across an entire valley, one of which was over a kilometer long and sent you zooming across at a height of over 500 feet. Quite simply put, it was one of the coolest things I've ever done and I can probably leave Costa Rica happy, now. Or something like that.

Unfortunately, as a result of schedule constraints, that's about all there is to tell about Monteverde (well, at least with respect to what actually, ever gets posted here...I can natter on forever).

As for the other awesome event, Saturday I went on a tour of a coffee coop and coffee farm. The prior being bland, dry, almost interesting but mostly boring. The latter saved the trip as we got to meet Don Arturo, the passionate, charismatic, politically minded owner of a small coffee farm who fed us well, chatted us up and invited us to come back again. It was one of those beautiful experiences that defies brief description.

He also has a crazy dream of taking a group of people from his community, backpacking through the Costa Rican mountains down to the coast while teaching natural history and English. He's looking for teachers. He asked if I would be interested. "Oh my God, please, please, please, I'd love to!" seemed a bit of a strong answer. So I just gave him my email.

Life, eh?