Canopy, Cocodrilos y Manuel Antonio

What a weekend! I left Heredia on Saturday at 6am (4am Oregon time) and returned Sunday around 10:30pm, completely exhausted. On Saturday, USAC had a trip assigned for all of us Heredia Students to go to the Ziplines (Canopy) and then on a Crocodile tour. And here's a short summary of my trip:

The ziplines: Too much fun!  It consisted of a series of ziplines from tree to tree. I started out ziplining to one tree and then unhooking and hooking onto the next cable and continuing. . .  The workers were really friendly and I learned some 'zipline' vocabulary with them, which mostly consisted of 'Pura  Vida', 'I'm fine' and 'How great!'.

Zipline! Photo credit: Canopy Tours Photos and Shannon

The cocodrilos:  We rode around in a boat and looked at various birds and crocodiles. The finale was the most impressive where our boat captain fed Fidel Castro one of the bigger crocodiles in the river.

This was a picture taken from our boat of Fidel Castro  

Photo credits: Caleb Davis

After that, Carlitos, one of our USAC advisors, was kind enough to arrange a bus to take a portion (around 20 students) of our group to Manuel Antonio (where we were unofficially extended the rest of our trip). We witnessed the gorgeous sunset from our awesome hostel patio. Saturday night was my first hostel experience and I loved it. It is such a great and affordable way to explore Costa Rica. I look forward to many more hostel experiences. I woke up early in the morning, 6am,  to roosters crowing and cows complaining. Later on in the morning, we walked down to the beach. The beach reminded me of Maui, except maybe not as clear.  It was amazing! And I'm a little red from the sun. I went to church on the beach, which was in English and Spanish, so I could actually understand what was going on. I think I prefer the Spanish translation :).

We spent the rest of the day there. I got a hamburger and fries for dinner (which unfortunately was not as good I expected it to be, but I was hungry!) and then we took a bus back to Heredia.  We were stuck in traffic for about 3 hours. Our bus driver explained that the traffic was from all of the gringos vacationing in Costa Rica. I guess I can relate.

This concludes my post! Until later, pura vida. 

Manuel Antonio - Photo Credits: Shannon Walklet