I guess I forgot to make a post about this. Probably because I knew the video portion would take days to upload, ok maybe not days but a long while. Even now when I tried uploading I only got one video uploaded so far so the rest will post when I can get blogger to agree with me. Anyway, I went with the school to this place called Bosque vertical (the vertical forest) and it turned out to be a really cool experience. I had never been ziplining before but I've rock climbed plenty so getting the harness system down along with the added safety precautions wasn't a big deal. The course was split into parts and you could choose the area you wanted to go making for an interesting and fairly challenging day because the advanced course takes about an hour and the kids didn't exactly know what they were getting into.
Let me back up a moment. After we had arrived and gotten all the harnesses on, there was a short instructional talk from the workers at the camp. It was all in Catalan so I was just watching to learn the proper safety measures. I thought this was a good idea seeing as though most all of these kids have NEVER done this kind of activity and they will soon be in the trees high above the ground. The baby course that the instruction was done on was indeed easy and I didn't expect it to be an all encompassing demonstration to prepare for the advanced course. The next step though, in my opinion, would have been to ask the kids who felt confident enough to do the advanced course after this basic training. After some hands inevitably went up, I would have laughed and demanded that everyone go to the beginner course and work your way up from there. This was not the case though and after the instructions were given out kids just ran off to do whatever course they felt like doing. Now I'm not saying that they aren't all capable of doing the course but I don't think 5 minutes is enough practice time for these complete and utter beginners.
Alas, I'm not in charge and the children ran off to put their fragile bodies at risk. Not surprisingly there were some issues on the more difficult courses. There were kids getting stuck at certain points and others having trouble with the cables' locking mechanisms. Commence epic mental face palm. The one good thing from a safety aspect is that once you are hooked onto the cables its impossible to not have at least one carabiner connected. So even if little Jonny just lets go of everything he'll still be secured by one part of the harness. This was comforting to a degree, however no amount of safety will suddenly make you a better climber or advance your logic to years beyond what we had at the zipline park this day. Oh well. Luckily no one was hurt.
After doing my time on the baby course, I went to the advanced because I didn't feel like the others were as challenging. I also felt like because I've climbed in the past it wouldn't to much of an adjustment. Especially because the hardest part is just keeping your balance while you walk across various obstacles in the sky (planks and logs and whatnot). Before I could start though, I went over to the first tree of the advanced course and saw that the kids were having some issues/going reallllly slow. This is where my previous concerns came to fruition. If a kid is stuck up in a tree 40 feet in the air they're not really in danger but it's a drag to have to wait while this problem is resolved. Especially because I couldn't climb up to help given that you aren't allowed to go up without the safety line and often the kid would still be connected to that very line. So the only method is to shout instructions up to a struggling child and hope they can get through it themselves. Talk about trial by fire.
This first video is me after I decided to help move things along by going up to the top of the first tree and help any kids that had issues. There were many.
The views from the tree tops were pretty cool actually and I'm glad I decided to bring the GoPro along for some adventures. The obstacles in the trees weren't super difficult but the most challenging aside from the balance was the fact that the main line you hooked on to was just about nose height relative to me. This made walking perfectly upright impossible and as you'll see in the videos the vantage point is from right above the cable. It wasn't too bad but it did make it a little harder to maneuver.
All in all I had a really good time and it made me miss rock climbing back home. I'll have to try and do more of that wherever I end up. It was good to able to add ziplining to the list of adventures especially when I had no idea that it was coming.
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