Rachel In Costa Rica: White Water Rafting

All right, so I'm still super behind, but this week I promise to get all caught up. So, on to white water rafting! This was..two weekends before last weekend, the day after going to Isla Tortuga. We got up really early, once again, and got picked up by a guy named Carlos for a two hour ride out to the region of Limón, to an area named Siquirres. The name of the company we went with is Exploradores Outdoors, and the staff basically consists of a bunch of guys in their twenties who love doing everything outdoors, including river kayaking down waterfalls, white water rafting, rock climbing, you name it.

So we ate breakfast, and then changed into clothes that could get wet, stored our stuff, and headed out in vans to the launch point for the rafts. It was a really windy, narrow dirt road basically going down the side of a cliff, and then the launch point was just this rocky beach along the river. We divided up into teams, got our life jackets, helmets, and paddles, slathered on some sunscreen, and then headed out.

I'm not going to lie, I was a bit nervous at the beginning, because I didn't know what to expect, or how dangerous it actually was, but our guide Roberto did a good job of teaching us the paddling commands and how to get down in the raft if we needed to, and where to place our feet and all of that. After a bit of practice, we started going down the river, and that was where the real fun began.

I don't really know how to describe this entire experience, because it's really something you just have to see and feel for yourself in order to understand it. The whole journey was a series of calm moments, followed by Roberto telling us to brace ourselves as we approached each set of rapids. The rapids are rated by level of difficulty, and the rapids we went down were anywhere from 2-4, so pretty mid-level, very good for beginners. There were a lot of different landscapes to see, but basically we were in this incredibly deep valley, more like a gorge, really, in between two tall mountainous cliffs of pure rainforest. There were a few quiet eco-lodge places every once in awhile, and a few indigenous villages that Roberto pointed out to us, but besides that it was pure wilderness, green green green, with butterflies flitting over the river and waterfalls pouring off the side of the cliffs into the river, and sometimes on to our heads if we were able to steer ourselves under them. It was absolutely phenomenal, and the actual white water rafting part of it was not at all scary, not even the littlest bit. We had so much fun going down the rapids, and all I could do was smile and laugh the entire time, as you'll see from my pictures, haha. Overall it was a fantastic experience that I want to do many more times. Here are some photos: