Category: My Wanderful Blog – Haakon

By Haakon

9/30/2019

This week I got to go to the Monteverde 100% Aventura Canopy Tour way up in the jungle tree tops. We drove four hours to Monteverde from Samara and most of it was dirt road with huge rocks, potholes, on a ridgeline not to mention we were in the middle of a lighting storm most of the way there. I ended up waking up at 5:45am due the noise from the wind outside. When I finally got up from bed and stepped outside, I was glad to see that the weather had cleared up, that wind blew away the clouds and rain. Next I had the best mango at breakfast – the day was looking good.

We were picked up at 7:15 by a tour bus to go to the top of the mountain where the start of the ziplines are. Once we got there the guides gave us a tutorial on how to safely break when going 35mph (according to the guides). Finally I got to go ziplining; the first 7 stretches were from 50-600 ft long then we finally got to the longest zipline in Latin America! It was 1,590m long and our guide said it was about 600ft above the forest floor. I got on and went across – it was crazy high.  When I got to the other side I was instructed to either go back to the main area, or do the Tarzan Swing. I obviously chose to take the the Tarzan Swing. You walk out to a suspended platform 148ft above a clearing where you jump off and lose all your guts for 5 seconds while dropping 100 ft into a really fun swing up to the trees. If you ever get the chance you should definitely go.

Haakon Gaaserud

Well this week I am going to write about my first two days on a surfboard. I am starting off on a 10-foot board and it is really hard to turn on but is for learning balance more that turning. I am going to move on to turning tomorrow on a smaller board, hopefully. The waves are 5 feet tops when we ride them at low tide in Samara Bay. Our surf instructor at Pato’s surf school is good, his name is Elder and we have lessons with him once a week. Elder coaches the national adaptive Costa Rican surf team, which is cool. We get to surf for five days for free after each lesson so I will get to go surfing pretty much every day for five weeks – Pura Vida! I had fun this week learning Spanish, surfing, and soaking up the sun.