Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Personal #3-Its been awhile

Oh where do I begin, it has been awhile since I have blogged about my personal experience here in Costa Rica.  I think it has been around two weeks, and in those two weeks I have experience more then the usual person would in a year I feel like.  About a week and a half ago, my group and myself started off our travels by going white water rafting on Saturday May 3.  We woke up at 5:30 and headed for the river.  It took us about three hours to get there, and as soon as we got there they had breakfast waiting for us.  After breakfast, which was really really good, we had to take about another hour bus ride to the entrance of the river.  In my raft there were six people including myself and one guide.  We traveled down 18 miles of the river through class 3 and 4 rapids.  In total it took us about six or seven hours to raft the whole trip.  I can't count the number of people that fell out, but I can count the number of people that fell out of my raft because I was the only person to fall out.  I don't really remember how I fell out, but all I remember was that the raft somehow turn sideways and I fell out after trying to hold on for a good ten seconds.  Now thinking back on it, I really wish that I had have held on tighter because where I fell out at was in the middle of probably one of the rougher rapids of the day, and it was not that much fun at all to have to swim down it.  I remembered the position that you were suppose to take if you fell out, and I took it but the water kept pulling me under and my butt would hit all of the high rocks and one rock hit my thigh and bruised it.  I really do not bruise easily and believe me when I say that it hurt when I hit that rock.  I remember water kept flowing over my head and it was hard to catch my breath.  This might sound like it took me ten minutes to go through this rapid, but it really only took about thirty seconds if that.  Other then that one incident while rafting I had a great time.  Lunch was great, the rapids were awesome, and the views were amazing.  I really wish that I had a water proof camera, so that I could have taken pictures to post on this blog.  We got back from the rafting trip around six at night and for the rest of the night I just went back home to relax because the next morning we were going to be leaving for the Osa at 6:00 am. 
 
Sunday morning I woke up at 5:30 again to leave for the Osa.  They had told us before that it was going to be a long ride there, but I really didn't know how long they really meant.  It took us 11 hours to get there.  I think that might be one of the longest times I have spent traveling on the road.  Just as a side comment right now, that is one thing that I thought about while traveling and that is about the road conditions that the majority of the roads are in.  I thought about how much would it really cost Costa Rica 
to repair all of their roads.  Not even paving all the roads, but just fix the pot holes and just 
evening them out.  Speaking of fixing the roads...haha.  One part of our trip we all had to get out of the bus and let me bus cross probably one of the most unstable brides, I don't think you can really call it a bridge, I have ever seen because there was a huge hole in the main road that we could not get around.  It was somewhat entertaining to watch this because where the bridge was located there was a bar right beside it, and there was an interesting character that came out to try and help us who was unbelievably drunk.  When he tried to talk he didn't speak English or even Spanish, it was more like gibberish talk.  Of the 11 hours of traveling, around an hour and a half or so was spent on a boat which was a lot of fun.  We road through some water trails that looked like we were in the Amazon instead of Costa Rica, but that is one really cool thing about Costa Rica and that is that there are so many different types of environments.  Finally, we got to the beach were we had to unpack the boats and head to the place where we were going to be staying for the next three days.  


When arriving at the place that we were going to be staying, I found that we would be staying in tents with three beds in them that overlooked a beautiful view of the coast line.  I am not 
complaining at all that we had to stay there because it was actually really nice for where we were.  We were the first people to stay at this newly opened "resort", and I am sure that the staff enjoyed having us as the first guest.  There was a main building that actually was really nice which was about a hundred yards away from where I slept.  The building had the bar, dinner tables, reading area, TV area, and just an unbelievable view of the coast line.  The first day that we were there we just got to relax which was just what I needed after a full day of traveling.  The next day, which was Monday June 2, we went to the Osa National Park for the full day where we walked through the forest, swam in the ocean, and got to hike up to the base of a waterfall.  While walking through the forest we saw the usual birds, lizards, and insects. The real cool part about that day though was being able to swim at the mouth of a river and the ocean and hiking up to the base of a waterfall.  Without failure though I had to hurt myself while swimming by jumping off a rock and cutting my little toe wide open and then jumping into the salt water.  Believe me it felt great.  The waterfall, I think was a lot better then the swimming though, because there was only about six or seven of us that made it up to the base of the waterfall.  We actually got to hike up the waterfall and feel the force of it.  At one point I almost lost my swimsuit because of the force of the water coming down.  For the rest of the day we went back to the "resort" and relaxed for the rest of the night.  

The next day, we all went snorkeling off the coast of one of the islands there in the Osa.  I don't really have that much to say about the snorkeling except that I saw a lot of different fish and that we saw dolphins swimming along side of our boat.  The reason I say this is because I scuba-dive and you really cannot compare the two.  If that had been my first time snorkeling without scuba-diving before I probably would have thought that it was a really good experience.  That night though was a very very interesting night because of the night life we had there.  The group that I am with went to the main building and had dinner like usual and then went to the bar, but this night differed from other nights because of a couple of guys that showed up.  There was a guy that came there from Miami, FL who had moved down here a couple of years back and heard that we were in town and decided that he would come over with some friends.  All I am going to say is that I was somewhat afraid for my life, and I think that I am speaking on the behalf of about half the group.  These guys tried to sell us everything, I mean everything.  

The next morning we got up and headed back for San Jose.  Overall, the weekend trip and white water rafting was a blast.  I definitely learned a lot about how blessed we all are back in the States.  

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