Travel #5: Sarapiquí Valley

This past weekend I went south to the rainforest in the Puntarenas province, near the Pacific coast. For those of you who know me personally, I'm sure you'd agree that I'm not exactly super athletic, but even so this was probably my favorite weekend here in Costa Rica.

For our first morning in the Tirimbina Lodge, everyone in the group shoveled down their daily serving of gallo pinto—it's pretty much a food group here—and went to a demonstration of how the indigenous Costa Ricans refined cacao (cocoa) into chocolate. We got to try the cacao at many different stages of the preparation process, but honestly the milk chocolate was still my favorite. Pure cacao has a really strong taste, making fancier chocolate with a higher cacao percentage quite bitter. The name "cacao" is a derivative of "caca agua," meaning poop water (as in the watery poop you get if you eat a seed like the Spaniards did). It isn't until the seed has been fermented, roasted, and shelled that it's worth eating. I wrote more about the origin and processing of cacao in a separate blog post here.

Later that day we moved to another hotel, the Hacienda Pozo Azul "tent suites." I'm not Trip Advisor, but if for whatever reason you find yourself in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, I would make a point to stop there. Our institute directors kept saying that we were staying in a "camp" and mentioned "tents," so we were all dreading a damp evening sleeping on the ground in the rainforest, but the name is definitely misleading. Each tent is 10-feet high and as large as many hotel rooms are in Costa Rica, with wifi, electricity, a patio, and an attached private bathroom. This hotel, instead of a star rating, boasts its 5-leaf rating. In Costa Rica hotels talk more about their eco-friendliness through the leaf rating than they do a star rating, and I will write a separate blog post about that soon.

First my group went white-water rafting on the Sarapiquí River for about an hour and a half. I've been rafting a few times in the U.S., but this was a very special trip. There were some rapids that were class 3, some class 2, some class 1 (6 is the maximum, at which point they're potentially deadly even for professionals), and some that perhaps didn't qualify as anything. What I really liked about rafting there was that the rapids were very frequent. I've gone rafting before and there were just two or three rapids, which pretty calm water in between. I guess all the rocks from the mountains create a lot of turbulence in the water, which makes for awesome rafting. I never felt scared of falling out or getting hurt though, my worst injury was a blister from paddling (which was actually terrifying, fearing I'd get a flesh-eating bacteria infection).

More cute, less scary when I realized it wasn't a rat

The digs were awesome, but the seal between the tent and the attached bathroom isn't perfect. Accordingly,

that night I got a visit from a flying squirrel in my room! I'm not certain which of us was more scared, but eventually I got him back out the way he came…

The next day, since we didn't want to spend a whole day trusting ropes and cables, some of us chose to go horseback riding over rappelling. I don't know whether the horses here are a different breed or what but they all seemed much smaller than American horses, almost as if they had been crossed with donkeys a long time ago. The guides led us over a bridge we passed under while rafting the day before, through creeks, fields,

and forest paths. Despite the sweltering heat, I enjoyed this episode of horseback riding more than I have in the past. The rainforest is just such a beautiful place to tour and the horses were very well trained,  so they only had rope harnesses wrapped around their heads—no bits.

We hide terror so well

With barely enough time to wipe the sweat off and reapply sunscreen, the whole group left to go do a 9-platform canopy zipline tour. Our group was approximately 20 people, so there was an interesting build-up of terror for everyone as we watched our companions zip off (literally, the wires make that noise) one by one. For whatever reason the instructions for activities that are even slightly scary never seem quite detailed enough to be soothing.  

When you zipline your hips are all wrapped up in a thousand straps and cords and carabineers, like an uneven, heavy diaper. You have one carabineer on a pulley on one wire that just helps you keep vertical balance, and another on a pulley on a second wire that supports your weight (this is my favorite pulley). To go, you just jump! The lines are always angled downwards, so gravity does the work.

That being the case, the first line was truly terrifying. My stomach promptly dropped as I left the terra firma—that I had never truly appreciated—to a very small metal platform mysteriously held to the trunk of a surreally massive tree. It was this day that I literally became a tree-hugger. The platforms were no longer scary after the third one, so it was good that there were 9: I actually had time to remember to look around me. I was reluctant to clutch a camera instead of a safety device, but here is a video of my boyfriend on one of the lines!

Ziplining in Costa Rica is definitely a must-do. As cliché as it is to do a zipline in the rainforest (though technically it may have just been the tropical humid forest), it's cliché for a reason: because it's really awesome.