Best day yet! I knew it would be. Today was whitewater rafting in the jungle day. We're moving out of the Arenal area and go across the divide to the SE corner of Costa Rica. We had a transport pick us up at 5:45a this morning (yeah...early, geez) and we traveled for about three hours (with our entertaining tour operator, Ricky Bobby) to our rendezvous point for our pre-rafting breakfast. We booked our trip with this recommended company called Exploradores Outdoors. They picked us up in Fortuna, drove us to the rafting sight and then took us on to the Caribbean...and all part of the price of admission ($99). Pretty cool huh? Don't you wish the Ocoee would do that for you?
This wasn't your average whitewater trip. It was my highlight of the whole trip. We heard it routinely quoted that the Pacuare is one of the Top 5 most scenic rafting rivers in the world. I think it lived up to its hype. The raft trip was 18 miles long (as compared to 6 miles on the standard Ocoee run) and hit both Class III and IV rapids (comparable to the Ocoee/Pigeon Rivers). We were probably on the river for a good four hours...no breaks!
There was lots to see and the rapids were fairly continuous throughout...not too many breaks. We floating through three canyons, all of which were pretty dramatic. The last was a narrow rock canyon with a decrepit rope and wood bridge high above crossing the river. There was a tall waterfall to the right that was slicing through the rock and falling into the river...very idyllic.
A thunderstorm (of course) hit midway through the trip and we had to postpone our lunch until the very end. It got a little chilly when it did start raining, but thankfully we had reached near the end of our ride.
We pulled into our final destination of our adventure tonight, Puerto Viejo, down on the Caribbean coastline near Panama for a little beachtime.
No camera on the rafting trip, so pic "borrowed" from the "A Dollar a Day" blog by some random girl from Canada.
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