Hanging Bridges

Here are the promised pictures of my canyoning trip, sooner than expected. Can you see how teeny the people on the ground look in the first one? That was the 220-foot waterfall. Stepping over the edge was the hardest part. The Parisian man I talked to yesterday said he had a friend who broke both hips canyoning, but the only injury I sustained is a big purple bruise on my knee. I don’t even know how I got it.

After just hanging at my hotel (Rancho Cerro Azul) for a couple hours, my next (much humbler but more educational) adventure came this afternoon with a guided walk through the Arenal Hanging Bridges. It’s a park that contains meandering paths through the rainforest and includes something like 17 bridges, six of them long and swinging ones across vast chasms. Our guide spotted: a tarantula (but I couldn’t see it deep in its hole), an eyelash viper visible from one of the bridges, and some toucans, and provided lots of nature explanation. It rained the whole time until we emerged from the forest to see that the precipitation had knocked down the clouds that had obscured the volcano all day.

I asked the tour operator to drop me off in town about five minutes from my hotel at the restaurant of his choice. He delivered me to a soda (a small family-run, informal restaurant with typical Costa Rican food: rice, beans, platanos). I hadn’t eaten since morning, but I barely touched my meal. I think my stomach shrunk over the hours. I felt very uneasy in town alone after dark, even though there wasn’t a thing in the world to be afraid of, and took a taxi home as soon as possible. My spirit of adventure has run dry for the day.

Tomorrow: horses and more.