Community and Zip Lines

Community is having your next door neighbor come over and try to explain to you in campasino Spanish (like English with a southern dialect...aka...hard to understand) that the coconuts you cut down off the tree for breakfast in the morning can stain your shirt. So the woman of the house shows you how to properly use the machete so as not to ruin one of your three shirts.

Community is sitting at the table of your home with the windows open reading about how to sustainably garden in a tropical area and having your next door neighbor come over and ask for help with his new garden patch.
Community is drying off after the shower you took following helping your neighbor with his new garden to find his wife standing at the door with a tasty bowl of food for lunch with a smile on her face that in all languages means thank you.

Community is walking home across the common yard you and your neighbor share and being presented with a bowl of tasty fresh cooked black beans that you helped pull out of the ground from his farm across the river the day before.

Community is having dinner together with your neighbors, playing with their children and joking until it is time to go to bed.

Community is taking the time to interact with those around you, even when you are busy, because you are never really ¨not busy¨and now...well now is as good a time as any.
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Zip Lines. Zip lines are not really like community. They are more like large metal cables tied from one tree 150 feet above the ground to another tree 300 feet away. Zip lines are a little more scary then community, but just as fun in their own way. Some friends of Travis came down to visit him and raved about a zip line tour in a national park north of him named Manuel Antonio. A zip line tour had been on my agenda from the start and with an invitation to return with them to the park and stay in their amazingly beautiful boutique hotel on the ocean I decided now was the time.

I was picked up from the hotel and driven on a tour bus with 13 other Americans deep into the jungle a good 45 minutes away. Our tour guides were hilarious and extremely informative and I bonded with them pretty quick. On a side note, do you know how high 150 feet is. Ok, well think about the 15th floor of a building. Now imagine that gandalf just turned that building to a 3 ft wide platform that wraps around a tree 15 stories up. Now imagine strapping your self to a pulley jiggermathing that allows you to fly across the jungle at speeds that far exceed speeds humans should ever reach. In addition we also got to repel from 100 feet in the air and swing from platform to platform on a ¨Tarzan swing¨120 feet up.

Shortly after this picture was taken I flipped myself upside down to ride as that was my preferred method of zip lining on the twelve or so cables we did.

The entire endeavour was extremely safe despite my various attempts to make it sound scary. The staff was professional and extremely witty. The other gringos were fun and the food after was amazing. Just thought I would update you on my terrible life here in Costa Rica.