Day 14 - Up, up and away!

Woke up early this morning to the iPod alarm, however the iPod was playing tricks on me. For some odd reason it decided to change its time on its own and it was now an hour earlier without me knowing. We had asked for a 7 a.m. breakfast, but we were now at the office for our breakfast an hour early. Randall and Leticia made us a typical Costa Rican breakfast of eggs, fruit, beans and rice and toast. We went back to our room to kill some time until 7:30 a.m. When we returned for our shuttle to Extremo Zip Line tours. We were the first ones there and paid our fee of $140 for all 4 of us, then they started to get us into our gear. There were about 12-14 people in our group and after a brief safety debriefing we were on our way up to the first zip line.

Elliot usually went tandem with one of the guides. Tegan was eager to do as many zip lines on her own. The zip lines were great fun; however, the hoofing it up the hills in the war humid weather was challenging. Towards the middle of our tour, we were taken down a rappelling area and then onto what is called the Tarzan swing. Tegan went first and she even did a the Tarzan yell. I went next, it was just like free falling from the plane for the first 100th of a second and then I just went swinging for a while until be manhandled by an inner tube to arrest my movement. Then Elliot was next and I was worried about the boy as I didn't think he would be able to do it, but he did. He didn't enjoy it, but he did it. Mom went after Elliot and she was a superstar and perhaps an adrenalin junkie. Elliot kept asking others in our group if the were "freaked out".

The last run returns you to the start and it is the 1 km long zip line. If you paid an additional $5 you were allowed to go down face down like superman. Tegan and I were the only ones that went down like this. It wasn't scarier, it was just a different approach to zip lining. I even got a video of the trip down with my camera, the end was the best part, when you are speeding along and then quickly brought to a stop by a breaking device on the wire line.

We had a quick snack at the cafe located on site and then we were whisked off to our next location; the canyoning tour. We were persuaded by the staff not to make Elliot do the tour and so it was just me and Tegan going on this one. We all hiked up to the gear up shed and then Tegan and I were led down to the first 2m rappel down a waterfall. I went first on all of the waterfall rappels. The water was super refreshing, enough to make you gasp for air when the water first douses your body. Actually, I had the same reaction every time I was drenched by the waterfalls.

The second waterfall was to me the most challenging. The tallest one wasn't as difficult, but I had to take a couple of breaks on the way down as it was tiring on the legs especially after all the walking up the hills at the zip line tour. Tegan was given a few alternate routes that didn't get here doused by the waterfalls like I did. Also there was a little trick that they throw at you that is somewhat static, but equally deceptive and cruel. The rappel ropes are actually cut a little short on a couple of the rappels so that you end up dropping into the pool when you run out of rope. Of course, I made a complaint about the short rope the first time we met, however the complaint conjured little reaction of the guides.

On the large waterfall rappel, Tegan was allowed to do a little zip line to bypass the falls and land directly in the center of the pool. She was belayed down from below, but her weight was too little and she basically just hung there. It was mostly do to the effort Tegan put in to work the rope up into the belaying device that allowed her to descend. It was pretty cool to see that she worked that out on her own. We were both happy with the canyoning tour and we met Mom and Elliot down at the office where we collected our cd of photos and then shuttled back to the hotel so we could checkout and be on our way. We highly recommend staying at Belcruz B&B and Monteverde in general. We packed in a lot of adventures in a very short amount of time.

Now we were off for Samara a little surfing town 4+ hours away. We had lunch in town, stumbled along and back tracked a little when following the gps, but we eventually arrived in Samara after nightfall. It was the second place that we stopped at that we settled on staying. We unloaded our gear and then went into town to have some pizza and then back again to get some sleep. Tomorrow we were heading north to Playa Negra or Playa Azul.