Just back from an excellent white water rafting experience with Explornatura. The trip was good value at $220 including an overnight stay at the remote and beautiful campsite by the river.

Its now the end of the dry season so the river was running a bit low but still plenty to have fun over the rapids and also to get some swimming in between.

All my photos are on Picasa at:-



White water rafting the Rio Pacuare

and a map of the route (including breaks in the GPS where I went swimming) is up on Everytrail:-



White water rafting the Rio Pacuare

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

We also went to visit a local indigenous community and their new school and sewage digestor. They hope to make it into a tourist attraction

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Today was canyoning day, originally it was going to be real canyoning . However, Ronald of Exploratura managed to convince me to go on their simpler local trip that incorporates zip wires and a hanging bridge. Mainly I suspect because he was going to be doing it anyway to show Kerstin, who is the Costa Rica Reisedienst for TravelDesign based in Traunstein, Bavaria and as such has the awful job of inspecting adventure holidays around the world! Well someone has to do it!!

Its a pleasant half day and a good introduction to canyoning and zip wiring.

My pictures are at Picasa:-

and there is a short video of Kerstin in action on YouTube

and the trip is also on everytrail too

I’m afraid the new Flickr uploader is proving very unreliable and Everytrail cannot import from Picasa as yet.

Tomorrow its a 2 day rafting trip with a night in the jungle and yep Kerstin gets to do that for free too

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Today I skipped my final lesson and Graduation Ceremony at Intercultura so that I could get away for some adrenalin experiences.

The bus ride from Samara to San Jose certainly made a good start in that direction it was a 6 hour 240km trip along a horrendous road, reminder to self, NEVER sit on driver side of bus! The sight of huge trucks hurtling towards you and virtually scraping the window whilst the driver is nochantly on the phone is well, terrifying and good value at 3350 colones!.

The bus to Turrialba leaves at the opposite end of San Jose, very close to the costaricabackpackers hotel so a nice walk with my over filled rucksac. I made the 4.30 direct bus and arrived at 6.30 after much cursing and horn blasting from the driver!

So a total of over 300km and 10hours of travelling for less than £6.

A very kind tico showed me to the Interamericamo where I have a double room for $11 a night. Tomorrow will book my canyoning and whitewater rafting trips plus maybe a hike up the volcano, which apparently is getting active again,

Now to tuck in at The Feria restaurant enjoying the wifi from the petrol station opposite!

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Finally decided to leave the Intercultura language school here in Costa Rica. I’ve had about 35 hours of classes solely in Spanish plus a few hours of homework.

What have I learnt? Mainly that I’m a slow learner like I was at school when I was a kid. An interesting life observation is that to succeed at school you need a good short term memory preferably with sufficient capacity to absorb several hours of stuff. In life memory is not rated that highly, thats why we have books & the internet, retrieval of information is most highly rated either by employing the right person to do it or been adept at doing it yourself.

I will maybe go to more classes in Ecuador or maybe in  Cusco with Sally for a couple of hours each day .

Tomorrow I’m heading off to Turrialba to try and get some more white water rafting experience or canyoning. Then its off to Ecuador to have some fun standing on the Equator, apparently there are loads of tricks and funny things you can do there.

I’ve enjoyed my stay here, especially Nuria’s cooking and her sister Ilsen who taught me at the school, Nelson my first teacher was great as well but the rest of the class was way to speedy for me….

Managed to get some DIY in by replacing Nuria’s kitchen sink taps and the loo seat.I really enjoy going to foreign builders merchants to see the real world in action

Well off for  final visit to Samara beach…

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Today I completed my first week of Spanish school and if the results of my first test are anything to go by it’s been a bit of a flop we had to write 100 words describing a family from 3 cartoon pictures – couldn’t even begin to make sentences! Filling in the verbs ser, esta, was ok as we were allowed a dictionary Will be interesting to see how I do next week, especially since I will be helping the school handyman who has no English.

After the exam it was straight in the minibus with 9 others for the 200km+ ride to Arenal to visit Volcán Arenal y Monteverde a $165 weekend exursion.

Tonight I’m sharing a deluxe room with Michael from Switzerland at the deluxe hotel. We’ve just returned from the amazing Baldi hot springs oasis of 25 thermal outdoor pools ranging from 67deg to 32deg. The star attraction was the humungous slide where you reach 30mph in an enclosed tunnel exiting in a huge splash into a thermal pool. Unbelievable only did it once though as I thought the old back might suffer.

Now it’s off for dinner then the others have threatened to take me to the disco….

.

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You just have to love the Spanish culture. Today we started learning verbs by playing charades. Some of the verbs the school deems essential in the @Nivel Principiante 1 Unidades de 1-7:-

eructar – to belch
orinar – to urinate
vomitar – to vomit
amar – to love
estornudar – to sneeze

I was given the task to mime eructar and poor Sandra at to mime orinar and construct a sentence using it!!

after much help I constructed the sentence :
yo trago agua cuando nado (I swallowed water when swimming)

Tonight I have 5 A4 pages of verbs to work through before class starts at 1.15pm tomorrow.

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After yesterdays fun trip along the coast to Corillo “yo monto la bicicleta” with Kerry who is also lodging with Nuria

Today was the start of Geoff as the “estudiante” after a very brief test at 7am I was, surprisingly, assigned to the beginners class

Wow! Nelson our teacher doesn’t speak ANY English in class so it’s real immersion. In my class of 6 there is Margaret an English GP (whose husbands blood pressure has dropped whilst she and her dog have been away! The dog returns later this week..)
Two Swiss German girls Sandra & Caroline – Caroline was my class amiga and pushed me along. Maiete from Holland and Rebecca.

It was straight into “la presentación personal” ” Yo me llamo Geoff, Mi apellido es Jones, Yo Vivo en Cambridge, Yo soy de inglaterra,etc etc
Then we had to do an introduction of our class amiga. Followed by going through the alphabet & fonètica bàsica.

No wonder my head hurt. But not so much because I signed up for two weeks at the Sàmara Language school and maybe if I still enjoy it for another couple of weeks.

This evening it was intensive salsa lessons, really great as it was given by a guy so I could easily follow his steps.

The atomsphere is great and everyone is so friendly if only I could say hija (sorry Emily that wretched j does me in).

Now for those 3 pages of homework to do before tomorrows class.

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As wonderful as the iPhone is you still need a connection to the outside world.

Here in Samara there are a couple of Internet places offering wifi at 1000 colones per hour (about £1.50) not sure how they define an hour for a mobile device!

Or maybe I could use the local I.C.E mobile operator although it’s not showing an Edge or 3G connectivity on the iPhone display and anyway O2 would want at least £6 per MB.

Which leaves trying to find some altruistic person leaving their wifi open. So far I’ve found two, both hotels. I was kicked out of the first one whilst trying to buy a drink for 3000 colones which I thought was a bit weird as I would happily promote his hotel for free, PR which would be priceless – alas not to be
The second hotel I will wait and see….

It strikes me there is a need for an open wifi system that only allows iPhones to access – since the iPhone ( in the form sold by Apple) is really only a low usage user. so places could display an apple to show they are iPhone friendly.

Time to go sniffing this time for dinner!!

I can recommend the wifitrak application by the way to sniff out networks.

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Had an incredible nights sleep on my boardlike bed, the secret is a quick shower then straight to bed so the latent heat of vaporization cools you down. It’s great to be woken by the squealer birds, just wish I wasn’t so stiff when I woke up. Need to do my pilates again. I visited the local Pilates place here but with all the free weights around, didn’t look like my kinda place.

I really love exploring new places, and could easily live here for awhile, just wish I could speak the local lingo, although my sign language & smile usually gets me what I want.

The town is not busy today, Good Friday is obviously a big deal here, although it was a very motley group parading behind the cross! So maybe it isn’t the religious centre of Costa Rica!

Today I’m meeting up with Evelyne & Mathias from Switzerland who sold up and have been touring the old British Dominions since January. Would be rather neat as a package tour concept. Tour the red bits of The World,. My Britanica 1890 edition would be ideal as the tour guide

Finished my Cafe Negro (not cafe solo here) so back to the beach.

I’m using the iPhone WordPress application in offline mode, just had major system lockup trying to attach an image

Thrown out of the original hotel, the owner refused to sell as drinks and switched the wifi off!!

Found another open link now – this time will keep it’s location secret

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