Today we conquered the river.
We had to get up nice and early today, at like 5am, to head through San Jose and Cartago, to get to our destination in Turrialba. But we weren't just alone. The van was full with 12 of us, all heading off to do the white water rafting. There was Jorge, Jose, Melania, Laura, her boyfriend, cousins and friends.
While going through Cartago, we got a glimpse of the big cathedral that is there. It is the main church of Costa Rica, and Jose told me this old story about the place that lead to the cathedral being built around a rock carving of the Virgin Mary. Every year there is a pilgrimage to the cathedral, and some people walk from as far away as Guanacaste. Jose has done it some years, but he has only ever walked from San Jose, which is still a distance, but not too far to walk in one day.
The ride was a bit cramped. My knees were almost up around my ears. But this meant I got talking quickly with all the others in between closed eyes.
Once we got to Turrialba, it took a while to actually find the company that we were going to do the rafting with. The problem was that there were no street names, and there were so many white water rafting companies in the area. Also, it turned out that the place we were doing it with, was quite hard to find as it had hardly any advertising or signage, just a banner saying 'Rafting'. We arrived there, signed our lives away on a piece of paper, slapped on sunscreen and bug spray, jumped in another van and were driven to the start of the rapids.
The 12 of us split up into two groups of 6 and were assigned a guide and a boat. Our guide's name was Mario, and he was awesome. Every time we went through a bigger set of rapids he would yell out 'oars up', in Spanish of course, and we would all lift up our oars and whoop. Before we set off down the rapids we had to learn the instructions that he would call. There were ones for paddling forward, backwards, one side forward one side backward, everyone to go to one side, and everyone to jump right inside the boat. We never had to use the last two.
One of the craziest things was when we would go down a rapid, and as we were doing so, my left side would start to paddle backwards while the right side continued to paddle forwards making us do spins while we were going down the rapids.
Mario told us that it was very important to stay in time with each other, and to be able to react quickly to his instructions during the rapids. I was at the back of the boat, opposite to Jose, so really we just had to follow those in front of us. But the guy at the front of my side wasn't the best at keeping in time so the paddles of my side kept being out of time. One time we ran into a bit of trouble with this as we weren't turning fast enough to avoid a rock, this was the fault of our side of the boat as we weren't in time with each other. This led us to bang the side of the raft into the rock. Mario had a bit of a talk with us about the importance of staying together. We did better the following times.
The view of the valley that we were traveling through was amazing with trees on either side. We were traveling as a group of three rafts with the same company. There was our two and another one which had a German family of 5. The actual company that we went with was called 'Loco's', which, yes, as I'm sure you all know means crazy. I thought that was quite apt for how the rafting was.
There were times when we would go down a rapid slightly sideways. When this would happen often you would get thrown about the place a bit. I was the first person to come out of the footholds that we had in the boat and I ended up on Jose's lap. At the time he thought that my falling on him was extreme. But oh, no, it got more extreme. At one point we went sideways down a really steep rapid causing the raft to sort of fold in half, which made all the people on the right side of the boat fall into our laps. This action caused the guy in front of me, Felipe, to fall out of the raft. He came up to the side of the raft like a drowned rat.
We stopped of for a lunch on the side of the river. There was so much to eat and drink, it was amazing to think that it was all only for $50 USD per person. One thing we had noticed while we had been paddling was that other than resorts on the banks of the river, there were stacks of stones that people had made. So at lunch time we took to making stacks of rocks and then trying to knock them down with other stones from a distance away.
Also at lunchtime we had a little talk with the Germans, and found out that the son of the family had been in Costa Rica for 6 months now, and was leaving tomorrow, while the family had arrived 16 days ago to meet up with him and have a holiday. His Spanish was very good, and supposedly, as Jose and Jorge said, he spoke like a 'tico' (a slang word for a Costa Rican).
After lunch we had another 2 hours of rafting. The most spectacular thing, other than Melania falling out of her raft, was when we passed through a canyon called 'The two mountain'. We had previously jumped out of the raft for a swim, but this time it was utterly spectacular. The sheer rock faces were amazing simply to be floating between. At one point we found a spot to climb a little way up and use as a jumping spot, it was very slippery to get up. Also in this second half of rafting, I did a thing called 'riding bull' where you go on the front of the raft as you go through the rapids. Turns out when I was at the front we went through the rapid backwards meaning that I couldn't see the big drop that made me fall backwards into the raft flinging my legs up into the air. It was quite hard to get back up from.
After making it the 18km through the river passing under a bridge near the end, we pulled the boat out of the water, got changed and headed back in the van. This was all after much conversation over whether we were going to buy the very expensive DVD of images that had been taken of us by a guy on a jet ski who followed us along. Turns out we got the DVD for a much cheaper price than the Germans.
By this time it was starting to get dark, so as we were heading back over the Turrialba hills, we stopped in at a little place for a dinner snack. I had a cheese tortilla because the cheese from Turrialba is said to be the best around. It was very cheesy and very rich.
After eating that, I did try to order a plate of alfajores, a type of biscuit, but turns out there wasn't any. We only found this out after about 15 minutes of waiting before actually asking the waitress to find out they didn't have any :(
We then headed back home through the dark of the night, passing through Catargo which had a fair on with rides and everything before returning home all very tired and ready for bed.
Before bed, the four of us in the family spent some time relaxing on Guisella and Jorge's bed watching a programme about a guy who had surgery to remove a huge tumor from his face. It was very interesting. Bed came shortly after.
P.S. Photos will come later. I am quickly trying to catch up on some blog posts, while still getting enough sleep.
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