Day 11 – 12, January 9 - 10 Puntarenas, Costa Rica

Punteranas means “sandy point’ or “a long narrow stretch of land”, and that is exactly what this area where the ship docked looked like – sandy, long, and narrow. Costa Rica is about the size of Tennessee. It currency is the Colones. The current exchange rate is about 500 Colones to the dollar.

We took an hour bus ride to a mountainside up in the rain forest where we boarded a cable car up the mountain. As we got near the mountains there was a delay in the traffic due to the fact that a bridge had washed out a couple of years earlier. There was a temporary detour while they rebuilt the bridge. Our guide said is we come back in about ten years there would be a new bridge. I wondered why it would take so long until I noticed the complete lack of heavy equipment. I saw that the excavation was being done by hand. I saw several men loading a worn out old dump truck with shovels. Other than the dump truck there was not a single piece of motorized equipment on the job site.

Once we got to the cable car on the way up the mountain we saw a huge variety of very tall and diverse trees. We also saw monkeys, toucans, humming birds, etc. We also learned about some of the things plants do to compete with each other for sunlight or protect themselves from insects.

We then took a series of about 10 ziplines down the mountain over the canopy of trees. Nancy and Jeanne don’t like heights, but the canopy was so thick we couldn’t see the ground which was between 100 and 500 feet below us! We didn’t know what to expect when we signed up for this tour, but it was an awesome, exciting experience.

We were all clad in a harness that went around our backs and chests, and also over our thighs and waists and around our rears. Two clamps were attached to our chest straps and then clamped over the two cables each time we were on the zipline. A guide hooked us up, one at a time, then told us to sit down (our bottom harness kind of worked like a seat) and we took off flying to the end of the cable. At the ends of each cable there was a platform build around several trees. The platforms were big enough for about 10 people to stand on them. Once we got to a platform, we were unhooked from the zipline, but hooked to a safety line until it was our turn to “zip” again. We all had so much fun we were ready to do it again!

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Day 12 – January 10 - Sea Day
It was very hot with sun bearing down so we stayed in the shade a lot, but Skip and Bob got sunburned anyway.