Monday:
Spanish Level: A near death experience causes you to forget all Spanish, or all of any foreign language and you immediately revert to your “mother language” or “native tongue”. NOTE for future travel: this is a great reason NOT to go horseback riding in a country whose primary language is NOT the same as yours because the horse will not understand you.

This morning I wanted to take a guided tour of the cloud forest, where you walk for 4 hours in the reserve with a guide and look at animals, mostly birds. There were some other cool things to do there too, a reptile reserve, a butterfly farm, and a serpent place too. Nick, you would have loved it!!! but somehow the girls from Israel talked me into going with them on a waterfall/horseback riding tour. They were so funny, I went with them even though I know when you weigh over 220 you don’t go horseback riding because it’s cruel to the horses. We drove an hour to the farm and they gave me a very strong horse, Hercules. We rode into the forest and it was beautiful. Then we walked down several trails and saw sloths, toucans, geckos, lizards, iguanas, ants, hummingbirds and some HUGE spiders. Our guide was good and his neighbor, a dog, came with us too. The dog was pretty cool because he stayed with us the whole tour and he is on their website. We were walking down to 4 waterfalls when I slipped in the mud… ugh. We went to the various waterfalls which were all very nice and at the final waterfall we swam in the water. This waterfall was the highest of the 4 and the water was FREEZING!!!! but it was all fun. Then we took the horses back up the mountain. It was very beautiful country and you could see the windmill farms from the mountain tops. Costa Rica gets about 10% of their power from windmills.

We were getting close to the farm “home” for the horses, riding along the side of the dirt road. One of the girls had a horse back in Israel and she knows how to ride so she was running her horse, this was bad news for me. My horse decided he was going to be in the lead no matter what. He started running and I couldn’t stop him. HOLY SHIT!!! I mean it was literally a miracle I stayed on this horse. I was begging her to stop her horse but she couldn’t stop hers either, they were racing. Finally my horse passed hers and I pulled him off into the grass. Whewh, I didn’t want to die or worse, break a leg or an arm or my neck! Well that was all fine and good then we rounded the final bend in the road before the barn. After that, my horse wanted the tour to end…he raced towards the barn full speed. I could not stop him. I have no idea how I stayed on this horse. I was bouncing all over the place left and right, yelling, STOP… NO HERCULES… NO MORE… STOP…. but he just kept on plugging away. I thought we were going to hit the sign for the tour but he raced past it and on to the top of the hill (I wonder if the grip I had on the reins was making him go faster?, I have no idea… and we had no instruction in Spanish on how to command the horses. Two ladies and another man came running up the hill to help me… one lady was calling the horse but I was so scared I told her to quit calling him and please just come help me get down!!! When I finally got off and sat down inside and had a drink of water I burst into tears. I was so scared but since I was ok, at the same time it was funny and serves me right because at my weight I knew I shouldn’t have ridden the horse in the first place. During the trip one of the girls said this was scarier than the canopy tour and now I think she may be right.

We got back to Monteverde just in time to catch the bus to San Jose. I almost didn’t get on the bus!!! Most places in Costa Rica you just pay the driver when you get on the bus but because the bus here only goes 2 times a day, and the drive is 6+ hours long, they sell tickets in advance… who knew?? Luckily someone didn’t show up and there was an empty seat for me because the next bus was at 6:30am the next morning. On the road from Monteverde to San Jose the view was absolutely amazing. The dirt road runs along the top of the mountain range and is very curvy and narrow; thank heavens I didn’t have to drive. I sat next to a lady who was probably 5ft 4, 230 pounds and about 65 years old. She was living on her social security traveling all around Central and South America. She was very interesting. She had 4 kids and had lived through the depression in the US. She remembered living without plumbing and electricity when she was very young and had recently sold a farm where she had lived the last few years with her two sons, an outhouse and no electricity on the farm. She was living now on $25 per day or less here. She told me about these books “I choose Costa Rica” or “I choose ____” which tell you about retiring in foreign countries. She was telling me a lot of history of Costa Rica. She had been a history teacher for years and she said now she’s sad to know of all the miss information she was teaching. It was good to have someone interesting to talk to because the bus ride was a whopping 8 hours!!! PURA VIDA, gracias a Dios!