Costa Rica Day 3

Day 3 in Costa Rica was probably the most exciting. We went whitewater rafting on the Rio Picuare, which is CR's premier rafting river. Since we went rafting, there aren't any pictures from this day. Dan took some with a waterproof camera, but I don't have those yet. The company we went with provided all transportation (3 hours each way), breakfast, lunch, all equipment, and guide. We had 8 people in our raft including the guide, who was named Ricky. He is probably one of the coolest guys in the world and I want to be him. Dan and I were definitely man-crushing hard. He was probably a couple of years younger than me, and you could tell that he just LOVED his job. The river was amazing! It was all class III and IV rapids the whole way. There were two really sweet canyons that we went in with really high cliffs. Probably one of my favorite things besides the sweet rapids was that we went by lots of indigenous villages. It was so so so cool to see these villages and huts on the sides of jungle mountains. It was pretty much straight out of the Discovery Channel. There were also lots of great waterfalls to see.

Apparently the river had received a lot of rain earlier in the week, and when that happens it can change the routes that rafts need to take in the rapids. There was one such rapid which conveniently happened to be a class IV. Our guide nor any of the other guides was completely sure which way to go, so basically we just had to guess and hang on tight. In the middle of the run, our raft kinda went up on a rock and a HUGE wave of water came over the raft and knocked me and the girl next to me out of the raft. I honestly thought at the time that the whole raft was going over. It's all kind of a blur to me, but somehow I managed to do a back flip over the side of the raft and I came up still with a grip on the rope on the side of the raft and my paddle in the other hand. I remember the only thing I was thinking when I went over was "I sure hope I don't hit my head on a rock." Anyway, it was pretty intense because this all took place right in the middle of this huge rapid. After a failed attempt to get me back in the boat by two tiny Indian (India) kids, Dan came to the rescue and got me out of the water.

After returning from rafting, we drove to the town of Nuevo Arenal. It was kinda late by the time we got there so we pretty much just got some dinner and went to bed.