Monday 7 January: Monteverde

Sal, Dana, Elaine, Dan, Tanya and ourselves were picked up at 10.00 for a zip lining trip to Extremo. This promised to be exciting and we weren’t disappointed. We had a short safety briefing before we headed up to the 1st zip line. After a couple of short runs it was time for a longer 425m run across the valley. For this one Wendy and I were put together, this turned out to be easier as there was less tendency to be turned around in the wind.

Two more short runs and we headed back across the valley on a 600m run and back for the third time on a 465m line.

2 more short ones and a bit of walking and we arrived at the 30m vertical rappel. This turned out to be rather tame as the rate of descent was controlled by the guides. The Tarzan swing got the adrenalin flowing, for half a second it seemed like you just dropped before swinging out and up with a good view back across the valley. After swinging backwards and forward 2 or 3 times the guides brought you to a halt. After that it was just 3 more short runs before the final 750m run back once more across the valley.
http://www.monteverdeextremo.com/

In the afternoon 5 of us headed up to the tree top walkways at Selvatura Park. It took quite a while to get out there and we hadn’t had any lunch and we were getting a little hungry. We managed to get sandwiches to go and we set off on the walkways eating as we walked. The trees were lovely but apart from the occasional bird we didn’t see any animals. We just managed to make the last shuttle bus back into town.
http://www.selvatura.com/

After we were dropped off at the hotel we decided to go visit the frogs at Ranario just down the road. These included the Red-Eyed Tree frog, star of the cover of Lonely planet guide.
www.ranario.com