Costa Rica Canopy Tour
or, Zip Lining
We had breakfast at the Lodge and then just walked out the front door and up the steps to the road. A few yards down the road a path turned up into the overgrowth. We followed a fairly steep path through the “jungle” up to the beginning of the tour. I was out of breath a lot and had to call a halt a couple of times. Thats not to say that this was a hard climb but to admit that I am 74 and have a problem with my blood not carrying the requisite amount of oxygen anymore. With my head down like that I did get a pretty good view of life on the jungle floor. Lots of cutter ants followed one another in unending lines from somewhere to somewhere else, with their section of leaf carried erect and oriented. That was odd.
We arrived at our departure place and put on our equipment, the so called “diaper” harness used for rappelling and for zip lining. Its a kind of strap around your middle and thongs through which you insert your legs so that you are sitting in a secure web with a strap that is fastened to the support, either the rope or the pulley, depending on whether you are rappelling or zip lining. In the case of zip lining you eventually do both.
I don’t remember much about our take off. it seemed at almost ground level but trailing off in to the lower depths of the forest. They hooked us up so we were attached to the steel cable by a pulley. You use your “weak hand” to take hold of the strap you are hanging from, place your other gloved hand on the line behind you, making an O so you don’t create a drag until you want to stop. Increasing the pressure on the line with that gloved hand is in fact the brake you will use to slow yourself down as you come zinging in to the tree platform at the end of each segment of ride. Not using it will blow your “catcher” right off the platform. Using it too much will strand you a hundred feet above the forest floor, somewhere short of the platform. When that happened I just hand over handed up the line into the tree. No sweat. Having done the rappelling already took some but not all of the fear factor out of the equation,. You were still a hundred or so feet above the ground, both during the ride and when you reached the next platform.
The ride was sheer exhilaration. It was a sweet smooth acceleration through beautiful tree tops, above a distant forest floor and over all too soon. Then and once during
we rappeled down to the forest floor (and from pretty good heights). There was just enough speed and just enough fright factor to make it worth while. It doesn’t begin to touch canyoneering but is still an excellent thing to do.