During our trip to Monteverde, my parents decided to spend our final day on a bird watching tour. As I could hardly stand listening to the bird watching conversations between my parents from the porch of our hotel room, I couldn’t fathom spending 5 hours listening to a group of people and a tour guide discussing birds. And, as I was pretty sure I had heard every imaginable bird fact in the previous 48 hours anyway, I knew Mitzi and I had to come up with a more enjoyable way to spend our time.
Let me give you a small list of things “I’d rather” do than go on a bird watching tour:
1. swim with very hungry crocodiles
2. be left alone over night in the African Palms
3. camp out at the bottom of an erupting volcano
4. carry a dead body up the La Fortuna steps
5. never eat gallo pinto again
Get the point? In the “I’d rather game,” bird watching loses every time.
My Mother just can’t understand my disinterest in birds. She told me that she doesn’t understand how I can live here (or anywhere for that matter) and not care about the names of the birds or the trees. It isn’t that I don’t care about them, it is just that my “caring” stops at “Wow that bird/tree is pretty.” As I generally live in an apartment in San Francisco, where my “view” is the building across the street, it is not like I need to go tree shopping for my landscaped garden and know the names of the particular species of trees. (Is that the right word, do trees even have a species?) And if I do decide to move to Costa Rica, it isn’t like I will need to plant anything, there wouldn’t be any room to do so. So my method of simply appreciating the beauty works just fine for me.
And frankly, while my Mom can’t understand how I can go without knowing the names of the birds and the trees, I can’t understand how she thinks that speaking Italian to the Ticos seems like a reasonable thing to do. Yup, that is right; my Mother spent her entire time here attempting to speak Italian to the Ticos. As you can imagine, it was not a huge success. Unless of course you consider causing my embarrassment a success, in which case consider this a National Championship.
In my Mother’s defense, she actually did well picking up the Spanish words for the things important to her (“Café con leche caliente, por favor.”). However, when she didn’t know how to say something in Spanish, which was often (not faulting her here, after 6 weeks of Spanish instruction, I often don’t know how to say things in Spanish either), she, instead of speaking in English (which most of the Ticos she encountered would have understood), spoke in Italian. A mysterious choice. My Father, who used to live in Italy and speaks more Italian than my Mother, didn’t ever resort to this technique… but by the end of her trip, my mother had this technique down to an art form. And by art form, I mean state of confusion for the Ticos.
When I would remind my Mom that we were not in Italy and were actually in Costa Rica, where people speak Spanish, she would respond that “The romance languages all sound the same.” Um, ok crazy lady, tell that to the Ticos who don’t understand a word you are saying. Though as I am trying to learn from the Ticos and be thankful for the small things, I would like to report something positive here. While my Mother was clearly having flashbacks of her trip to Italy last year, the flashbacks were luckily not severe enough for me to find old underwear in the trashcan. Hallelujah.
And while I don’t know the names for the birds (though I do know how to say bird in Spanish), I don’t dislike them (the way I do cats)… and actually felt very sorry for them recently. During my usual early morning activity of watching the monkeys on my porch, I heard a lot of loud bird chirping, and noticed the birds were flying quickly towards the monkeys in a very aggressive fashion. My first instinct was to be very angry with the birds and to tell them to leave my monkeys alone, they are endangered after all (and way cuter than a bird could ever hope to be).
Then, to my dismay, I realized that the reason the birds were angry and aggressive was because the monkeys were stealing the eggs out of their nests and eating them. No, no monos, don’t do that! It broke my heart. My perfect monkeys all of a sudden didn’t seem so perfect to me. For a minute I was angry with the monkeys and tried to decide if this would cause me to not like them anymore (which lets be honest, would be impossible), but then I reminded myself that is the circle of life, so while I was still sad, I was no longer angry.
Then one of the monkeys did a little flip around the phone wire which made me laugh and was the cutest thing I have ever seen, and all anger and sadness was instantly forgotten. That didn’t take much; I wonder if that is what it is like for parents with their kids? Yes, I know I just compared a parent’s love for their child to my love for the monkeys… but I really really love them… and as we are decedents of the monkeys, it is kind of like family, right?
Geez, how do I get so sidetracked, and how does every posting come back to the Monkeys? Sorry, back to my need to come up with an activity other than bird watching. Well, let’s add one more item to my list of things I would rather do than go on a bird watching tour:
Have an anxiety attack while over 500 feet in the air hanging on a very thin wire.
That’s right people, Mitzi and I decided to take a “Zip Line Canopy Tour” which I now refer to as “Hell on a Wire.” Who ever invented these zip line tours is one narcissistic son of a biscuit.
After paying a lot of money to carelessly risk my life, I was immediately asked to sign a form acknowledging that there is a significant chance that I may not return from this excursion. On this form, they also ask you to write down your passport number, which I have now come to realize is so they can easily notify your next of kin when you don’t return.
After giving them the necessary death certificate information, I then walked into a small room with a lot of equipment, and a handful of remotely attractive tour guides… cute, yet short…which frankly is a problem with most of the Tico population. While I have not researched whether Costa Rica has a National Basketball Team, I would be willing to bet they don’t.
Upon entering the equipment room they point you in the direction of one of the tour guides who straps you up with a bunch of gear, and provides you with a bright yellow helmet and some very large and sweaty gloves. You are then shuttled off in a bus to the beginning of the course. When you arrive at the course, they divide you into 2 groups (one for the English speakers and one for the Spanish speakers) to give you their best advice on how not to die while on the zip line. The “zip line instruction” goes something like this:
1. put one hand at your waste buckle and one hand back behind you
2. if you want to slow down, use the hand behind you to break….BUT don’t stop yourself as you will then be stuck in the middle of the line and someone will have to come get you
3. if using one hand as a brake isn’t working well enough, use both hands and sort of “bounce” on the wire
4. if you start to spin around, reach your hand farther back
You mean you are about to push me off a bunch of platforms to fly above the rainforest and that is all the advice you have? Great, thanks for the instructions, but where is the practice, isn’t this sort of like driver’s ed where you have to complete a certain amount of hours with an instructor first? Nope, not so much; they believe in the “sink or swim” approach to zip lining.
We climbed up to the first platform, which they told us would be the “practice run.” I thought what that meant was that we would have a short, low to the ground line to get a feel for it. While that wasn’t even remotely close to the truth, this was the only zip line on the whole course where I could actually see the landing platform before being pushed off the starting platform. The rest of them were blind starts.
The first line wasn’t really that bad, I didn’t like it per say… but I wasn’t feeling panicky… yet. As it turned out, the further we got on the course, the more that I became panicked. I have never had an anxiety attack before, but at over 500 feet in the air on a zip line that was a kilometer long, I was probably as close as I will ever be.
On the longest zip line, before pushing me off the platform, the guide said “What ever you do, don’t brake at all on this one because you will get stuck in the middle.” I did not like the sound of that one bit, especially when I was flying at speeds faster than I was comfortable with (which frankly is anything over 5 miles an hour).
As I was flying above the trees, I made the mistake of looking down. Now, I couldn’t see the ground because it was just trees below me, but it all of a sudden dawned on me just how high up I was and I started to feel panicked. About that time I started to swing back and forth and felt like I was going to start spinning in circles like a ballerina in a music box.. though she is graceful, and small, and in pretty clothes… AND NOT OVER 500 FEET IN THE AIR ON A WIRE THE SIZE OF A CABLE CORD. I don’t care that these are the same cables that NASA uses, NASA just sent a bunch of astronauts to Mars with a broken bathroom, I am not so sure I want to trust NASA.
As I was swinging, my natural instinct was to brake and stop myself from spinning… but then I remembered the one instruction they gave me before pushing me to my impending death “don’t brake.” Well shit, what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t see the platform at the end, so I knew I still had a considerable way to go, and I certainly didn’t want to have to do the rest of the line backwards… or worse, while spinning in circles, so I started to panic. Which immediately resulted in the "I'd rather" game:
Would I rather be stuck in the middle of a kilometer long cable, over 500 feet in the air, hoping that one of the guides came to get me before the line broke, I peed my pants, or someone else came barreling into me...
or
Spin around and around and around on a zip line while traveling at ridiculous speeds
I really think this is the most scared I had ever been in my whole life… so I was running through my mind all of my possible life saving options (which as far as I could tell there weren’t any), and quickly moved onto repeating the instructions they gave at the start, when I remembered that they said if you were starting to spin to reach your “brake arm” farther back. So I did, and I stopped swinging, but continued to fly at a speed at which no human should travel without the safety of metal around them. When I arrived at the platform, I decided that I was done, I wanted off… yet there didn’t seem to be any place to go and sadly there were about 8 more lines, as there were a total of 17 on this course. And by course, I mean death trap.
Which makes me wonder, what is that stupid yellow helmet for anyway? They call it a “safely device,” but if I fall from the zip line, a little plastic yellow helmet is not going to help me, or save my life. However it probably would make it easier for them to spot me during their search efforts. Notice I didn’t say search and rescue, because if you fall from that zip line, there ain’t no way you are walking out of there alive.
Let me tell you this, despite all their licenses and certifications, I know for sure this is officially the least safe method of transportation in Costa Rica, and that is quite a powerful statement. Give me cars with no breaks and crocodile waters any day of the week. And while I usually resort to praying during my scary transportation situations, this time I was too scared to come up with the words necessary to pray. Unless of course it is considered praying to scream “Holy shit I am going to die!” In which case I was praying like the Pope. Hey, at least I said “holy.”
Here Mitzi on one of the zip lines. Notice that you are not able to see where she began... but you can see how high she is in the air....and some of the lines were completely above the trees.
You can see Mitzi is smiling, she enjoyed this much more than I did... and she wore flip flops. How she kept those things on her feet while flying at those speeds is still a mystery to me.
Here is one of the tour guides (aka satan's helpers) waiting at the end of one of the lines. Now to me, this is the perfect height for a zipline...if I am only a few feet above the ground, I could sit back and enjoy the ride.
Here I am, thankful that I could cross one more line off the list and counting the minutes until this tour was over.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, we came upon the Tarzan swing. I remembered doing one of these Tarzan swings at Young Life Camp back in 9th grade, and here in Costa Rica the people who were swinging were yelling with enjoyment, so I thought maybe I too would like the Tarzan swing too. Nope.
I got to the top of the platform, and Juan hooked me up to the swing and started moving me towards the edge. It was at that point that I decided this was a bad idea and definitely not something I wanted to do. So, in the best Spanish I could come up with in that moment of terror, I said “Yo no quiero.” But he moved me to the edge of the platform where again I said, only this time louder “No, no, yo no quiero.” At that point Juan pushed me off the platform and I went wildly swinging through the air yelling “NO ME GUSTA!” “NO ME GUSTA!” The guides all thought this was very funny; me, not so much. When they let me down off the swing I decided then and there that I was never meant to be a jungle girl... though I am still not opposed to coming down with a case of jungle fever.
Then it was Mitzi’s turn, and after seeing my traumatic experience, she was having second thoughts. So I, as any good friend would, yelled up to her “Oh no Mitzi, if I did it, you have to do it too.” Misery does love company.
Preparing to plunge to my death. This is much higher up than it looks in this picture, as the platform is really at the top of a hill.
If only there was video of this, you think the monkeys outside my house are loud... you should have heard me screaming.
And not only are the hats worthless from a protection standpoint, but couldn't they make them any cuter? Although I tease my wild and adventurous parents a lot.... they are clearly smarter than me. Here is one final picture... this is their version of zip line excitment.
I am proud to say that I successfully completed the course alive, without breaking down in tears, and have now officially checked "zip line" off my life list… So for those of you who are coming to visit and want to do the zip line, I am happy to make your reservation… and I will meet you at the pool when you return.
