Hey, if I'm gonna puke, which way do you think I should aim?

This past weekend, I went on my first excursion with the language school. Kanopy. AKA Ziplines. It was... interesting.

I've seen pictures and heard stories about some of my friends doing this before when they visited places with really intense mountains and/or rainforests. It was one of those things that always kind of terrified me, but I also kind of always wanted to do--or at least be able to say that I had done. 150Q seemed like an entirely reasonable price for putting my life in danger, so I decided, what the heck. There's no time like the present.

We left the school Saturday morning at 7am. While I am usually up by 6:30am here (San Pedro, while it seems to be a sleepy little town, does not have much respect for people who actually sleep during the night), 7am is much earlier than I ever have to be anywhere. I was not super psyched about this part. But I made it, and my fellow students and I stood around comparing sleepiness for a little while before Mynor told us it was time to go get in the car.

Perhaps I should take a moment to talk about transportation in San Pedro. Cars and drivers licenses are very expensive here. Most Guatemaltecas I've talked to have never driven a car, and don't even really like riding in cars. Therefore, the people who do have/can drive cars are in a great position of power. Most people in San Pedro walk most of the places they need to go. If they happen to have a lot of stuff to carry or they're in a very big hurry, they have two options. The most commonly used is the tuk-tuk I wrote about in my last post. If you can imagine that a moped and a go-cart had a baby, you might have a good idea of what these look like: one front wheel, centrally positioned driver, cramped backseat with a low ceiling, and generally covered in whatever stickers and decals the driver/owner could get his hands on. The second, less common but more durable option is the pick-up. It's a very complicated Spanish word that roughly translates to pick-up in English. That's right. Pick-up trucks with a metal frame around the bed and flashing blue lights cruise around and take people in between towns, up and down the mountain, to the campo, etc. It was this second option that was our "car" to the zipline.

So all 11 of us pile in to the bed of this pick-up and hang on for dear life since we immediately start driving up one of the biggest hills in San Pedro. We rode up the mountain in the back of this thing for about an hour and a half, excepting the 15 minutes when we had to get out and walk up an especially steep hill because there were too many of us for the truck (which seemed to be surprisingly low on horsepower considering its vocation) to handle carrying. By the time we got to the zipline, I was feeling pretty ill.

We get out, admire the view of the lake for a little bit--which, I must confess, was really incredible--and then head up to the office. We get on our gear and start hiking. It takes about fifteen minutes to get to the first line. Essentially, they hook you up to this wheeling contraption that glides over a cable and you step off the face of the rock. The first line was really awesome. My feet almost touched the tops of the trees the whole way across, and I felt like I was flying... for about 25 seconds. After a terrifying stop by a guy with tire rubber wrapped around the cable, I laughed like a maniac for about three whole minutes. Luckily, everyone seemed to have the same reaction.

Another hike, since the second line is higher up, takes about 25 minutes (at least for me, because 3,000meters is really high elevation for an east coast girl who's badly out of shape). I'm severly nervous about this next line, because I can tell just by the hill we walked up that we have to be much much further from the other end of the cable. I elect to be the last to go. I get hooked up and I think the operator had to tell me three times to step down onto the platform before I actually did it because I was thinking don'tletmediedon'tletmediedon'tletmedie so loudly in my own head that I didn't know he was talking to me. The second line, I am told, takes just under a minute to cross. It seemed like much longer. The platform is well in the trees, although you can see that the trees eventually drop off, but when you reach the .7second point and the trees around you actually do suddenly go away, it's quite unexpected. For the next 55 seconds, there is nothing between you and the tree tops but hundreds and hundreds of feet of air. I will confess that it was really exciting, and a beautiful view. But it was also terrifying.

I'm barely unhooked from the line, and still shaking like a leaf when the guide from the other platform comes zipping across himself, casually breaking and gliding to a stop like it's no big deal at all to fly across a valley. We take an insanely quick group picture. Hike back over to the lodge. Return our gear. Get in the truck. Head back down.

If I thought I was feeling ill on the way up the mountain, I was mistaken. Maybe I had waited too long before eating the breakfast my host mom so kindly packed for me. Maybe the adrenaline did gross things to my stomach. Maybe standing in the back of a pickup truck flying down a mountain in neutral is a dangerous and barf-producing way to travel. But I barely made it back to San Pedro without losing it all over myself and my friends in the back of a pickup truck. I went back to bed.