Monteverde: Zip-Lining

Well, of course we went zip-lining in Costa Rica. How could you not? That’s sort of like going to Venice and not taking a gondola ride. There are zip-line tours all over Costa Rica, but Monteverde is definitely one of the premo spots for it. There are several companies that run zip-lines there. We went on two of them: 100% Adventura (which translates into English as “100% Adventure,” in case you were wondering) and Selvatura.

Both tours began in pretty much the same way. The shuttle bus picks you up from your hotel along with a bunch of other folks and drives you out of town to the zip-line park. Then you’re fitted with a harness, helmet, and gloves and given a brief safety lesson. Then you queue up and wait to get on the first line. People tend to spread out after the first one, so wait times drop off after that.

The first of the tours we did was 100% Aventura. It was highly rated in fun and safety and supposed to be one of the more thrilling ones. We started by climbing a flight of stairs up to a little platform in the tree canopy. The first one was pretty much for practice, only a couple hundred feet long. The operator stationed on the tree top platform hooks your pulley on the cable and attached you to that with a carabineer, and off you go. The gloves have a thick leather pad glued over the fingers and palm that you let slide over the cable to keep yourself from spinning. On the shorter cables, you were in charge of your own breaking (done by pulling down on the cable), I pretty much figured if I wasn’t being told to slow down when I was approaching the next platform, I wasn’t going fast enough.

When I was in my teens, me and a buddy set up a zip line between two trees at my parents’ house. In that version, of course there was no harness, you just held onto the rope, and there was a little plywood seat you could sit on, and there was no fancy platform to set off from, you just climbed to the top of a ladder and set off from there. It was thrilling for a few brief seconds, and then you were at the end (if you were lucky and jumped off the ladder a little, you could hit the hard stop). The first couple cables were an improvement over the home built variety in every way, higher up, better scenery, faster speeds (you wanted to break before the end instead of seeing how fast you could get going). But they were basically that same experience taken to the next level. After a few runs, they changed things up and let you do a rappel down from the canopy. They asked you how fast you wanted to go. I said fast because why not. A quick drop before the guy handling the line starts putting on the breaks, a bit of an adrenaline rush, then you’re back on the ground again, and a short walk and stair climb later, it’s back on the cables.

The cables started getting longer and longer, and with that, they gave you the chance to relax and look around. As the zip-lines got longer, they stopped having you slow yourself down and used a breaking system instead. It was actually quite nice, since it gave you look around and enjoy the scenery without having to pay attention to speed. Now this was more like it, whooshing through the treetops, enjoying the view, bit of a rush. Ahh, yeah. Then came the big lines. On these, you had the option to “superman.” That meant that they they turned the harness around so you were hanging from your back, laying flat, looking down. There are two lines that you ride like this, and they are LONG. As 100% Aventura proudly points out, they’re the longest in Latin America. The longest of the two runs comes in at just about a mile. Now this was something completely different from the zip-line I made in my youth.

To start out, you lay flat and take the slack out of the lines to the pulley, then the operator lets you go and you start to pick up speed as the ground drops away from you. At least for me, this is where primal fear of  falling to my death kicks in, but there’s plenty of time to relax and let that go. Then you can look around and enjoy the feeling of cruising along in midair a couple hundred feet above the ground. It is somewhat like flying, if you could only fly in a straight line and had no control over your speed. So I guess it’s like flying badly. You get going quite fast –  judging by the wind speed, probably around 25 mph. Fast enough that the mile long trip doesn’t take that long. The day we went, there were pretty heavy cross winds so you swayed back a forth a little on the trip. Then you approach the platform and hit the line break and come to a fairly dramatic stop. It slows you down from cruising speed to a complete stop over about 20-30ft – if you were stopping that fast in a car, you’d leave some rubber on the pavement. Here’s a line to a quick video of Elani at the end of her run:

After two long thrill rides soaring over the tree tops, the tour was almost over. Just one more ride, which they called “the maga tarzan swing” and presumably added to the park because they don’t like repeat business. It was optional, but of course I did it. On reflection, I’m not sure I made the best choice. It’s probably worth noting at this point that I’m a bit afraid of heights. It’s not so bad with I’m attached to something semi-solid that prevents me from hurtling toward the ground in free fall. My fear of heights at this point in my life is at a level that the zip lines were more thrilling and fun then terrifying, but the maga tarzan swing was not. I walked out on to a bridge built on four steel cables stretched across the valley I’d just zip=lined over. Well, part of a bridge, it went a couple hundred feet out and terminated in a platform with a gate. Elani went first, and I was walking out as they rigged her up and let her jump. She screamed, then the whole bridge swung violently as she hit the end of the lines. It was not confidence inspiring. The two operators reeled in two large, heavy bungee lines and attached them to my harness. They pulled me up against the little gate that was the last thing that kept me from falling. Then, before I was ready (though in all fairness, I might not have gotten to “ready”), they opened the gate and shoved me out. Then there was a long moment of free fall, too long. I know my brain was doing the math and about how long with would take to hit the ground and how long I had been falling and those numbers seemed too close. There was no reassuring jerk of a line going taut ether, they were bungees. So, they didn’t provided a lot of feedback until the direction of travel changed and I started to swing. Swinging out over the trees would have probably been pretty fun, but I was a bit shell shocked at that point, and was pretty much just riding it out until I was on solid ground again. Okay, that might have been too much adventura, I guess I needed more like 95% adventura. But, when I wasn’t being forcefully reminded of my own mortality, the zip-lining tour was amazing.

A few days later, we decided to do another one of the zip-line tours. We chose one of the other companies in the area, Selvatura. The rides were a bit less “extreme”, but they traded more on views of the forest, and they did not disappoint in that regard. Selvatura’s park was located just outside the Santa Elena nature reserve (if you want to read about my experience there, check this out), so it was located in beautiful, dense cloud forest. Appropriately enough, the forest was covered in a thick fog the day we went.

 

The zip-lining itself was a pretty similar experience. The combined cable length of this park was at least the longest in the area, though the two longest rides were a bit shorter than the last one. There were mid-length runs, which was nice, because as I mentioned the scenery here was great. The second longest run was done in tandem, with two people on the same cable. Of course, I went with Elani. They rig you both on the same cable, with one person in front of the othe. The front person (Elani) holds the other person’s ankles under their armpits. The view as the back person wasn’t great, which is especially inconvenient as the person in the back does the breaking, but not until the operator signals. Which of course you can’t see, because there’s someone directly in front of you. There’s also a cable break, so it’s not that important, and there’s good odds the whole thing was set up to amuse the folks running it. The longest run was done “superman” style again. The fog was thick enough that I couldn’t see the other end of the cable. It gave a somewhat eerie effect. Out in the middle of the cable looking down I could just make out the tops of the largest trees through the mist. It reminded me of looking down into deep water and just being able to make out the largest rocks on the bottom.

This tour ended with a swing as well, though it was a “tarzan swing” not a “maga tarzan swing,” which I guess meant that it didn’t have the whole free fall/bungee element. This one, I liked. I was just a very large rope swing, and as you hopped off the platform there was only a brief moment of falling while the slack in the rope was taken out and you started to swing out. I got a video of Elani doing this one:

I can definitely see why zip-lining is getting to be such a popular tourist activity. So much of the time tourist activities have a sharp split between hiking and looking at beautiful, unique natural attractions and exciting “adventure” activities that you could pretty much do anywhere, including your home town, and not have to spend all the time and money to get to. Zip-lining is fun and fast and a thrill but still allows you to take in all the beautiful natural scenery around you. Really, if I could do away with all this pesky walking and just zip-line everywhere, I’d be set.