Writings By Location| Not Wet Enough: Sightseeing in Monteverde | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
A couple of hours later, refreshed and ready to do some more, we headed out again to try and do the Sky Walk, which was a series of bridges suspended among the treetops of the cloud forest. It took another 15 minute drive over mud and rocks, once again, into the clouds and mist that kept us insanely damp. Once at the top, we were just seconds away from getting right back in the car and turning around, after seeing the dangling cables and unfinished bridge hovering above us. If that was what we were to be walking on...no thanks! Our astonishment failed to dissipate when we found out that the "basic" walk along the bridges was $12 per person. The advanced "sky trek", which included zip cables and pullies, was something like $25. This is more than most Costa Ricans make in a week, yet we were expected to pay this for an hour or walking — in that drizzly rainy mist, too. We just couldn't stomach paying this much money, even though a stray cat made every attempt to get us to stay by actually climbing up onto our shoulders and purring louder than the howling wind outside.
Notice, by the way, how everyone here takes American money. They actually like it better than their own, I'm told. It's more stable, for one thing, and the people are actually considered to be in separate social classes based on what kind of currency they earn. Kim tells us that nationals that make more than a certain percentage of their earnings in US dollars get vastly better mortgage rates, and better tax rates. So even though the credit cards are rining up in colones, whose value plummets every day, virtually all prices for tourism and hotel activites are given in dollars.
So with the Sky Walk being a bust, we instead drove a few more kilometers down the road to another reserve, the Santa Elena Cloud Forest. Expecting more of the same from this morning, we paid our $8 to get in and got a map of a quick 60-90 minute trail. Unfortunately, unlike Monteverde this morning, this cloud forest was a lot more rain than cloud. The paths were in very bad shape, often flooded and without any blocks of stone or wood to mark it. Plus, the rain came streaming down much heavier than before. Even though the canopies gave us some protection, the amount of water coming down soaked us before long. What's worse, we apparently made a wrong turn somewhere, and our 2.6 kilometer trail turned into at least 4 or 5 kilometers. We would stand for minutes analyzing the map, even pulling out our compass to determine the map was hopeless wrong and inaccurate.
As icing on the cake, we kept running into signs that said "Informaccion, 2 km" with an arrow, then 20 minutes later, when we were sure we'd gone about a kilometer, it would read "informaccion, 1.7 km". 15 minutes later, it was "1.5 km". I did the math in my head and decided that either: 1) we were travelling these paths slower than Stephen Hawking would, or 2) they were lying. Given what we were seeing yesterday, I'm going with the second one. Erin thinks they were really miles, but they just said kilometers. If this weren't a fully metric country, I'd almost believe that. That, and the fact that we would still only be travelling at less than one mile per hour on flat (albeit wet) ground. I think Erin and I managed to survive mostly by reminiscing about another death march we once took....
