Whitewater rafting in Costa Rica

I´ve been in Costa Rica for the best part of a week now, and on my last day I decided to go whitewater rafting. To be honest the river was pretty tame compared to the other rivers I´ve been rafting on - the Zambezi, Mekong and the Nile. There were a few grade 4 rapids and quite a lot of 3´s, but no grade 5´s. And noone fell out at all! And the raft didn´t flip over either. Mind you, on the plus side I didn´t end up with severe cuts on my face and I felt pretty safe most of the time.

I met some cool girls in my hostel in Monteverde, two americans and one brit, and hung out for a bit which was nice. Meeting people is one of the aspects of travelling and staying in backpacker hostels which I love.

Another week, another hurricane

We have been experiencing driving rain and thunderstorms but no strong winds. I´m about where the red dot is in this satellite image, in Granada.

Flying through the jungle

I left Leon and travelled to Granda with a Swiss girl I´d been hanging out with called Patricia and an American girl called Nadia. Granada was reasonably pretty and the nightlife was pretty cool, but one of the biggest draws for me was the canopy tour.

The canopy tour was advertised as an amazing experience where you would fly through the jungle. This it was, but they don´t tell you how unpleasant the journey to get there is. It was around 4 hours for the round trip on a really rocky path - not even a road just a dried out riverbed. Several times we had to get out of the 4 x 4 to remove logs from the dried riverbed, and the jeep was jumping around like crazy.

Anyway, after two hours of painful travelling we arrived at the canopy site. We were given a safety briefing and then had to climb up into the trees. We had a rope ladder, but the whole process was terrfifying. The maximum height we were at was 30 metres or 90 feet.

They claim you are attached to a safety wire at all times but in fact this is not the case, and there is a moment on each of the platforms where you are detatched and reattached for the next zip line. It is not unheard of for people to die doing this activity - for example the woman in this BBC News story.

I´m starting to worry that doing dangerous activities all the time is putting myself at risk. If there is a one in 10,000 chance of serious injury on each activity, surely my luck may sooner or later run out.

Anyway, I wouldn´t recommend doing this, but the rest of the time I spent in Leon was pretty amazing, and I had a cool time with Patricia.

Volcano boarding in Nicaragua

I travelled down to Leon, Nicaragua with Kris. One of the first things that caught our eye was a trip to hike up a volcano and then go down it on a modified snowboard. The drive to the site took an hour or so on a pretty sketchy road. Then the hike up was a reasonable 40 minute scramble in the heat. The views from the top were pretty amazing, and as soon as i get them emailed I´ll put them up.

Then I had to board all the way down. I kept asking the guide about injuries and he kept denying anyone had any, but when I pressed him he admitted that people had been pretty badly grazed, and I met a girl in a bar later that day who had damaged her knee joint to the extent that she was returning to the States as the quality of medical care was so poor.

I had no knowledge of this when I stood at the top of a 700 metre volcano however, only that I was terrified and that I wasn´t sure why I was doing this. Setting off I actually found it relatively straightforward, and the overall journey was pretty swift, and although I fell off a couple of times I didn´t seriously hurt myself.

That night I met a whole bunch of people at the hostel´s quiz night, and we all hung out together as a group for about a week or so, going out partying and going to the beach. Great days.