Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Personal

Turrialba Canyoning

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 🙁

Long distance bus travel

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!

School days are happy days?

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…

First week

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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