We are experts on the rapids

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  Manuel Antonio National Park, Province of Puntarenas, Costa Rica
Sunday, November 22, 2009

We woke up at the crack of dawn to set out on our next adventure - class IV white water rapids! We had breakfast at Flora´s, obviously since it was free. I had option 1 with ´sausage´.  It was an Oscar Myer hot dog. Eh, close enough for Flora to consider sausage I suppose.

Our tour guide, Julio, picked us up at 7:30AM. There was another couple in the van from Atlanta. Nathan thought they were mother and son. They were in fact husband and wife. They spoke of their kids and I saw them kiss a few times. Pretty sick if they are in fact mother & son. Then, there were 3 other people in the van who were in the hotel industry. We don´t know anything else about them really because their English was about as good as our Spanish.

Now, when we booked this tour, we watched the video on their website and the rapids looked awesome. The guide almost fell out in the one video. It looked intense. We were really excited about our adventure.

We arrived and we took a little nature walk through the rain forest to get to the water. We learned about coffee beans, plants and trees. It was kind of interesting, but I was just really impatient and wanted to get started. We finally made it to the river and had a brief safety instruction. Nathan and I were the only ´experienced´ rafters. I have been twice and Nathan once. I did the New River in WV my freshman year of college, but I don´t count it. The river was flooded so there were no rapids. It was just a fast moving river and the water was frigid. In fact, I hated everything about that trip - the 8 hour car ride, camping, almost going over a cliff, our driver, the river..everything. I still have a scar on my left wrist from the back seat of the van that I went through to get my snickers bar. The second time I went rafting was in Malaysia last year, which was Nathan´s first experience. The rapids there were fun, but nothing scary. I believe they were only class III so we were looking forward to stepping it up this year. So, since we had these experiences under our belts, we were considered experts. Since we were experts, they put us alone in a raft with Julio, our guide. It was just the 3 of us! All the others took to the other raft. Why they didn´t split us up and make it more even is beyond me.

Since it was just the 2 of us, that meant I had to work and paddle this time. I was not happy about this. I hate paddling. I told the guide I wish we had more people so I didn´t have to paddle so much. He told me it doesn´t matter the number of people in the raft because everyone paddles for their own weight. Bull shit. If that´s the case, then last year someone was definitely compensating for my laziness. My arms began to burn and the guide kept yelling to paddle harder. I wanted to slap him in the face with it. At this point, I get a little bummed about the rapids. They were weak! Where are the rapids in the video?! It was just a fast moving river with small rocks to create small rapids. I was really disappointed. We then switched guides and got Julio´s younger and stinky brother. He reeked of major body odor. We stopped at some point to get a snack - pineapple, cookies, water and monkey brains. Monkey brains is the name of a fruit that when you crack off the top, it looks like brains. I ate 2 - they were tasty.

We then got on our way again, down the somewhat fast moving river with no rapids from this point on. This angered me because it meant I had to paddle more. My left shoulder was on fire. The smelly guide was crazy if he thought I was going to ´paddle harder´on his command.

When I saw the van, I started paddling faster since I wanted to end this thing. They loaded up the van and we all headed to a small restaurant in downtown Quepos. We had a pretty tasty meal of...wait for it...rice and beans. I also had a pork chop, which I devoured. We got back to Flora´s at 2PM and it was rainy so we were lazy bums the rest of the afternoon. We just drank Imperial and flipped back and forth between the English speaking channels on our TV. I was exhausted after that ´work out´so I took a cat nap. We woke up later that evening and went to the Airplane Restaurant. We had to go to some place ´official´ looking because we were running low on cash and had no idea where an ATM was located. We had to use plastic and most of the shit holes we typically visit don´t accept this as a payment option,. The Airplane Restaurant was a plane that was shot down over Nicaragua during Regan´s presidency. It was a pretty big controversy from what I gather quickly reading on the menu. This restaurant claims to have bought the actual plane. I am not sure if it´s true or not, but it was nonetheless a pretty cool place. We ate up our rice and beans and accompanying meat. We drank our Imperial and headed back to Flora´s...with my arms still burning from the day´s activities.

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