So chalk up another great weekend the on the list of Jaime´s great weekends. Saturday we headed up to Monteverde. When I say up, I mean UP. The cloud forest was at the top of a mountain. No biggie, right? No, the road up there was quite similar to the roads around the mountain you see on Bugs Bunny. No guard rails, nothing standing between you and certain death. In some places these roads were barely wide enough for our vehicle. The bus driver didn´t seem all the concerned about hugging the mountain either. In some places people were passing us. There wasn´t enough room for one vehicle yet people were maneuvering around us at high rates of speed. You have to have some cojones f-in´grandes to be a bus driver on those mountain roads. And the people that pass said bus drivers? Well, I´ve talked to a few jealous elephants. Anyway, there we were, traveling up and up and up on the non-paved, pothole filled road (no one informed me that a sport bra or 6 would be helpful for this journey). For a little while I considered informing the bus driver that I had never heard of anyone actually reaching heaven via mini-bus and, if it´s all the same to him, could we just take the real road. I managed to hold my tongue.

Finally we reached the town of Monteverde, where we checked into our hotel, Hotel Don Taco. Yes, that´s right, Hotel Don Taco. I believe that´s a completely unoriginal and smartass name I would have come up with for a Mexican Hotel but there she stood. We ate some lunch and then piled back onto the Bus of Chestal Pain (that was actually printed on the bug catcher) and went to the reserve and walked around for a couple hours. The cloud forest was so cool!! Everything was completely green. Even the bark of the trees was covered in green moss. There were Tarzan vines everywhere too. I considered taking one for a spin but I knew that in the process of swinging from vine to vine I would almost certainly happen upon the pissed off, vine-colored snake. I didn´t want that to happen so once again, I refrained. I was all about restraint this weekend. We walked to the Continental Divide, which was high enough to see the whole world and then headed back.

The next day was why this trip was so damn cool, however. I know that I wrote on here that I was going to go on a zip line. I was wrong, I went on 11 of them. One was 450 feet in the air. You could look down on birds as you flew across them. They weren´t like those pansy ass Noah´s Ark zip lines either, these bitches were LONG. It was easily one of the coolest things a person can do in their life time. Unfortunately, after that it was time to hop back on the bus and head down the mountain. Ugh. I took about an hour and a half to go 35 km, which, I suppose, was better than the 2 hours it took us to do in on the way up. Oh well, it was worth it. Well, as much as I´d like to live in denial, I´m on the wrong side of an almost 4 day weekend. Time to go to Ecology class. Every time we finish a 4 week term of Spanish we get the next Monday off. Unfortunately that doesn´t go for our electives. Oh well, I ain´t gots nothin´ better ta do anywho. Peace.



- posted by Jaime @ 11:28 AM