I was pleased that my brother Doug and his daughter Jane could come and join me in Costa Rica. They had originally planned to sail from El Salvador to Nicaragua with me last spring when COVID19 disrupted our plans. I rented a car to pick them up at the airport in Liberia. We had a nice dinner at Hacienda Blue in Playa Panama. Owned by an ex-pat from Turkey, the food was superb. Doug and jane were delighted to be dining al fresco in early January.

I decided to take them to Hacienda Guachipelín where my friends and I had a great time about a month before. We started our day on horseback. It had been decades since I was on a horse. The one they gave me was marginally responsive to my cues to go and to turn. He also liked to stop for a bite of greenery here and there along the way and clearly had gotten away with this in the past.

Then a bus took us to the banks of the Rio Negro. There we carried in big sturdy inner tubes down to the river and got in the water. The river was not quite as fast as a month before, when I had turned turtle twice on this run, but the rapids were still very exciting. We got very wet, bumped our butts on a few rocks, and laughed our way down the 5 Kilometer stretch of fast moving water.

After a lunch at the Hacienda, we went on a zip line tour of the Rio Blanco canyon. Nine zip lines in all and one place where we had to swing across the canyon, Tarzan style, to the other side. We found ourselves zipping past waterfalls and over beautiful vistas of a rugged river terrain. I was delighted that Doug and Jane enjoyed it so much.

On our drive back to the boat, we stopped to do some provisioning. We were thinking about our trip south around the Nicoya Peninsula to Quepos.