Day godknowswhat: Me Jane, everyone else Tarzan
Priya Ramani -
Sunday, June 01, 2008 5:33 AM
(Photo: Husband launches himself into the great green, about 80 m above the ground)
My stomach muscles still hurt after yesterday´s activity. Canopying, they call it in Costa Rica. It´s not supposed to make your stomach muscles hurt, but maybe I was doing something wrong. Hey, I´ve always been more Phantom than Tarzan anyway.
Canopying is the rage in Costa Rica. There are tours everywhere--near San Jose, in the Arenal Volcano region, in Tamarindo or Monteverde. We picked Puerto Viejo coz we´re here and I wanted to tick it off before the husband got even more somnolent.
Canopy tours essentially involve you wearing a harness, a helmet and gloves and then whizzing over some of the tallest trees on earth, like Tarzan, albeit aided by a cable.
Fred, who picked us up in the morning, was a chatty sort. By the end of the day we knew he was a recipient of the Larry King Heart Foundation--hell LK even visited his hospital bed after his open heart surgery. He had a few children, had come down from Los Angeles to try to make it in Costa Rica, had lived on the beach for a year or so, had been bitten by a parasitic bug (they´re there in India too, he informed us with the insight of an insider), had hired a shaman lady to fix himself...you get the drift. Meanwhile, I´m feeling carsick on Costa Rica´s ghastly roads and cursing the fact that I didn´t pop one of the miracle pills Gitu left with me in New Zealand.
(Photo: Before, let´s go!)
Our guides Randy and Pablo were the other extreme--strong and a little too silent for my liking. I hope they´re going to tell us what to do at some point, I asked Bella, the Spanish girl who couldn´t speak much English but whose fear didn´t need to be communicated in words. My heart is beating, she said, in case I had missed the point. I fell in love with her immediately. Don´t worry, how difficult can it be to swing over trees babe, I replied calmly.
On the first canopy, a wooden platform from where you launched yourself on to the cable and from where you got across 100 metres or so above the treeline, I was the last to go. Even Bella went before me.
So I´m in a harness, strong arm (left) stretched behind me wrapped loosely around the cable lifeline legs outstretched and crossed in mid air in front of me, right arm placed in front, on the band that connects the harness to the cable and I go.
All the folks before me went silently and effortlessly. But we´re playing Tarzan right? So I decide to inject some drama, add some volume. Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo and I¨m off.
Don´t brake ie pull the cable down with your left hand, the guide is gesturing in sign language we just learned. But I´m barrelling towards another wooden platform, I´m going to use those brakes. And that´s how I became the only one to stall in the middle of nothing.
Let´s just say I´m more Phantom than Tarzan. Caves, ghosts, walking, now that I can do. Let´s just say there were 23 platforms and cables that were 80 metres high, and I did stall more than once in the forests meant for Tarzan types.
Alas I was the only Jane in the group. At one point even strong silent Pablo had to say it: Preeya, you are funny.
But it was a blast.
It´s something else to trek through slushy rainforests between platforms and to look down at the ground so far below when you´re on that cable. Tarzan´s eye view is something else. We saw lazy sloths and a walking palm that moves one metre every five years.
Randy, who spoke Carribbean English, enjoyed canopying upside down and who lived just down the road in the middle of nowhere with his girlfriend, played the part of rescuer brilliantly. (Photo: After, embarrassing)
And best of all, it´s a first-hand look at the way this country preserves (and profits) from its rainforests.