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Published: January 2nd 2008
After 4 days of solid rain on the coast, we finally got a day of glorious sun on our penultimate day. Typically, the following day was lovely too, which is not much good when you´re cooped up on a bus for 4 and a half hours!
Our next destination was Santa Elena, the nearest town to the famous Monteverde cloud forest. Another nightmare bus journey occured as our new bus was too wide to make a tricky turn going the usual way and there was an accident blocking the road on the alternate route. We were not impressed when this journey ended up taking 8 (boiling hot) hours instead of 4. Boo!
However, all this trauma was forgotten as we arrived in Santa Elena and swiftly booked ourselves into a ´twilight tour´where we were guided through the cloud forest with torches in the dark and looked for different animals and plants. We saw birds sleeping in trees (very bizarre), racoons (very cute!), a few sloths (one with a baby, very hairy!) and a tarantula in a hole (very icky!).
The next day we booked ourselves into a day of fun with a company called 100% Aventura. The first
part of the day involved walking along wobbly metal bridges through the canopy level of the cloudforest. We had a really funny young guide who actually made all the boring botany stuff really interesting. We saw a plant nicknamed ´the toilet paper plant´because its really soft and velvety on one side and weird ficus strangler plants which are related to the fig tree. They grow on the outside of big trees, strangle them and kill them, then the original tree on the inside rots away so that the result is a hollow tree. Strange!
Next part of the trip was something we´d been looking forward to from the beginning of the trip- ziplining through the trees! We got harnessed up, put on our helmets and started zipping along through the trees! It was so cool! You go really quickly, but because the lines are so long you have plenty of time to take in the beautiful scenery around you. One of the lines was 100m high and 600m long! Even the rain couldn´t dampen our spirits! There was also something called a Rappel where they dangle you from a platform and then basically just drop you and only stop
Hannah sniffing a milipede!
Apparently it smells like almonds, but seeing as I don't like almonds or milipedes, I gave it a miss!you a metre above the ground. No-one explained that this was going to happen, so I was a big girl and screamed and screamed and screamed!
Next was the Tarzan swing. I am impressed to say that even though Hannah and Emma wimped out of this one, I went through with it. You had to climb up this massive platform then step off the edge (I had to be pushed!), then freefall until the rope is fully extended, then you whizz back and forwards, swinging though the trees until the blokes at the bottom stop you and pull you down with some sort of random balloon belt! I must admit that several phrases which I can´t write on this blog escaped from my mouth, but it was such an adreneline rush and I´m so glad that I did it!
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Matt
non-member comment
Envy....
I want to do that!