Pura Vida!!! - Part 1

A couple of weeks ago (I can't believe it was even that long ago) we left our beautiful girls with our loving parents as we took a hiatus to the blissful Costa Rica. What a wonderful vacation and probably the best one we've ever had. I'm still having a hard time adjusting back to real life. I was spoiled...very spoiled. There was no alarm clock (okay, just once) no children to bathe and feed and entertain, no phones ringing, no water main to worry about (that's a whole other story), and no work. It was just Matt and me and beaches, wildlife, jungle and thrilling adventures. So here's a little taste of our amazing vacation. Just know that you will want to go there after you're done reading this. Read on if you can handle the temptation.

After a long flight Monday, we arrived in San Jose and Matt immediately jumped into his Spanish with our taxi driver. I think he really enjoyed the chance to brush up on it while I just nodded my head and said, "Si, si."

The next morning we woke up bright and early and headed out on a two hour van ride to experience our first adventure, whitewater river rafting. I've been river rafting before with my family, but this was a first with Matt.

We went with a tour group called Exploradores Outdoors. They fed us a delicious breakfast at their base camp and then drove all 18 of us in our group out to the Pacuare River. In our raft of seven people, there were three single girls from the states and then one globe-trotter from Switzerland. Our guide was an young Tico (Costa Rican) nicknamed Pinky. I can still hear him saying, "Forward! Forward hard! Get down!!!" in his heavily-accented English. He worked us, and oh did we hit some great rapids. (Sorry about the picture quality. These were taken with our water proof camera and then scanned in. I'd like to say the pale skin is an effect of the photo scanning, but it was our first day of vacation, so we were both pretty pasty.)





The river is has class III and IV rapids which are a great size for some good fun. At one point Matt almost fell out, one girl did fall out and we were both smushed by Pinky as he was catapulted by a rapid from the back to the front of the raft. There was a photographer in a kayak who actually got a picture of Pinky in mid-air. It was a great shot, but we didn't want to fork out the money for the souvenir CD of photos.

After three hours on the river we stopped for lunch. It was a make-it-yourself-wraps bar prepared by our guides and the kayakers from food they brought along in the rafts in barrels. YUM! It was also our first up-close introduction to the jungle of Costa Rica. All of the plants are huge and so unique.



One of our favorite parts of the run, besides the rapids, was getting out and swimming in "the canyon". The warm river was much calmer there and surrounded by sheer rock on both sides with a waterfall and the jungle hanging over the top.





One of our newfound rafting buddies described it best. "It's like we're part of a travel brochure for Costa Rica!"





At the end of the run, we were treated to a teenage kid risking his life diving off a bridge for a chance at earning some tips from tourists. You can see him below as a speck at the top of the bridge, and in the second picture he's in midair half way down the height of the bridge. Don't worry, he survived, hitchhiked on a raft, and ran back up the bridge to do it all over again for the next group.


We had a blast on the river, and it was a great introduction to the country. Well, that's sure a lot of info for one blog post. There will definitely be more to follow.