The Bowden Family: Day 3: White Water Rafting

I had never been white water rafting, but thought that it would be fun to try. We got up early and drove into La Fortuna. It turns out they didn't offer the tour that we had booked on that day (the people that booked the tour for us at the tree houses don't speak Spanish so there was probably a misunderstanding...if I had a phone I would have just done it myself) However, the people were so nice that they decided to do the tour anyways. We got a private tour, which was pretty weird because there was a guide, a driver, and a guy in a safety kayak, which meant there were more employees than tourists (which we found was fairly common for pretty much everything we did)

They started off the tour by showing us Iguanas at some restaurant.

These things were huge. Apparently the store owner decided that he needed something to attract more tourists, so he bought a few iguanas and threw them on the tree next to his restaurant. Just a few years later the iguanas reproduced, and now there are about 400. They were seriously everywhere.

Our next stop was the river. Most every large river in Costa Rica has a hydroelectric dam. They release water everyday, but it's pretty unreliable. Unfortunately, the water level was really low, but we did the best we could with what we had. On the river there are about 30 rapids, so you really don't have to wait to long before the next set of rapids. Rachel and I did pretty well, and each fell off once. Unfortunately for Rachel she fell off in a real bad spot and bruised her back real bad.

All in all, it was a lot of fun. We even did some cliff jumping in a deeper area.

After finishing with rafting we went to a Costa Rican restaurant to eat some "Comida Typica" which means Typical Food. It's pretty bland, but if you smother it with the Costa Rican salsa (which isn't very spicy) it's pretty dang good.

On the way back I saw a dog run out in front of the van, and I knew it was a goner. The driver was paying too much attention to avoiding wreckless kids in the street and didn't even see the dog. We all felt this huge bump and felt something hit the bottom of the van. I didn't want to say anything because I was afraid Rachel would be upset. Then the guy in the back yelled "Atropellaste un perro!" (You ran over a dog). Rachel understands enough Spanish to know what he was saying.

I was just thinking about how odd the situation was, and then for no reason I just burst out laughing. I felt bad, but once I started laughing everyone started making jokes to the driver. We nicknamed him "El Mataperros" (The DogKiller), and everytime we saw a dog on the street everyone had a smart aleck comment for the driver (who was obviously worried he was going to get in trouble for hitting a dog) like "Oh man poor thing didn't even see what was coming". "Your sick man, you didn't even slow down", or "Oh man that dog up ahead has no idea what kind of danger he's in".

The tour guides were awesome, and were a lot of fun. They really liked the fact that I could speak Spanish and taught me a bunch of Costa Rican slang.

We got back to the hotel at about 4 or 5 and were exhausted so we pretty much just fell asleep until the next day.

Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures of white water rafting, but we did take some more pictures of the hotel the next morning.