Ziiiiip-lines!

Saturday, 14 April

Back again very quickly for once, but with a short fun update. Today, as Norma is in New York, I treated Niall to a major male-bonding thing for the week— a canopy tour on “zip-lines” at SkyTrek. Zip-line tours are something of a specialty of adventure tourism here in Costa Rica, and there are dozens of places that have them around the country. Here in Monteverde we actually have 6 different canopy tour operators! So… what’s a zip-line tour? It is a series of steel cables strung in the forest canopy from platform to platform that one traverses while dangling in a rock-climbing harness from a pulley. The pictures are pretty self-explanatory! Now it’s really cool to be up in the tree canopy and all, but frankly, zip-line tours are not really about nature or ecotourism—they are sort of the equivalent of a low-tech rollercoaster that just happens to be set in the rainforest. It’s all about the thrill… and Niall was thrilled! Most of the lines were a couple hundred meters long and 30-50 high, but the biggest one was over a kilometer in length, and at least 100 meters up in the air. I don’t recommend zip-lines for the faint of heart, or those with acrophobia, but it was a lot of fun otherwise ;-)