Catching you up

About 4 days ago I gave you the negative run-down on our New Year vacation in Mexico. In that post I promised a more balanced summary of our week away and so here it begins...

Puerto Vallarta Vacation Highlights - Part Uno

Los Verranos Canopy Tour

It was the one thing I was determined to do while away. I've been sky-diving, paraseiling, pot-holing (caving), abseiling (rapelling), and snorkeling (which is a big thing for me given my fear of water and fish) and this was absolutely next on my list. Of course, I was somewhat spurred-on by my travel heroine, Samantha Brown, the perky, pixie-haired presenter of the Travel Channel's "Passport to Europe" and the more recent "Passport to Latin America." Samantha had already inspired last year's visit to Stockholm and so, when I saw her zip-lining across a tropical abyss in PV, I knew I just had to do it too. (Which brings to mind the parental retort: "So, if Samantha Brown jumped off a cliff, would you follow?" Sadly, the answer is most probably... yep!)

I would have been quite happy to zip along on my own if nobody else would dare to do it with me but Hubbie and Mummy said they wanted to go too. Cool - a 60 year old Brit and a husband with vertigo. This was going to be fun!

I should probably clarify here that want may have been too strong a word for Hubbie, who I think was determined not to be out-adventured by me but was nonetheless keen to just 'get it done' to say he did it, rather than for the joy of the experience itself.

Eager not to get stage-fright, we head over to the tour office in the hotel on our first day and inquired about the various canopy tours available and the varying skill/fitness levels required to participate. Based upon the description of the participants, our tour person, Moses, picked a fairly local tour at Los Verranos. We booked it for the next day.

The following afternoon we were bumping along in an open-topped truck, freezing to death and hurtling towards our unknown fate. (Did I mention it was the coldest winter in 20 years?) It was a beautiful ride, along the Pacific coastline, passing expensive beach-side resorts and gaining momentary gilmpses of spectacular rock formations rising out of the ocean.

Los Verranos was located at the end of a dirt road, seemingly only wide enough for a European hatch-back yet attacked by our truck-driver with the speed limit of a German Autobahn. We got out and immediately encountered our first hitch - the kind of hitch I am quite literally incapable of getting through or around: a ten foot python.

What? There's not sufficient adventure in sliding along a metal rope 500ft in the air that you need to add dangerous reptiles to the mix!?

Anyone who knows anything about me, knows that I have an unreasonably violent, paranoid reaction to snakes. I have absolutely no idea where this fear came from - it's not like you have pythons or rattlesnakes in your yard in suburban London - or what it's rooted in. All I know is that, for the longest time, I haven't even been able to look at a picture of a snake. I kid you not: if there's a picture of a snake in a magazine, I'll scream, throw the magazine across the room and wait for someone else to rip the page out of the magazine before I can even pick it up again. Given that this is my reaction to a piece of paper, you can imagine my sheer and utter paralyzing panic at seeing the real thing not five feet in front of me, wrapped around the neck of a Mexican tour guide. God Bless Mum, she stood betwen me and it while I ran, face turned away, into the main tour complex and away from the scary slinky thing. (I'm getting cold and sweaty just thinking about it)

After that, the zip-lining seemed like no big deal. Well, at least to me. Thankfully for Joss - who has arachnaphobia - they kept the tarantulas in the animal house and brought them out only by special request from visitors who wanted to have their photo taken with the spider crawling on their face. We did not personally witness this (thank God) but saw photos to prove people really are this nuts.

Our tour guides and care-takers for the day were awesome: a bunch of 20 or so late-teen/early twenties, good-looking Mexican dudes who were as much actors as anything else. Suiting up in our harness and getting our safety tutorial was an opportunity to enact some well practised comedy-skits for the boys; their high-jinks almost successful at making us feel like we were about to head onto something as innocuous as the It's a Small World ride at Disneyland. The problem with all the frivolity was that there really was some very serious information being imparted in it's midst - and there was a lot of it! The speed at which the guys zipped (if you pardon the pun) through the safety instructions even left me feeling as though I was going to freeze-up and forget everything they'd just told me. Essentially, however, we needed to remember all of the following:

1. To get hooked-up on the zip-line, give the "sexy leg" to your guide at the platform. (I could describe but it's more fun for you to imagine.)


2. For the first line, lay back with legs crossed, arms bent. Look out at the platform through your right arm and smile - this was your photo op.


3. For all other lines, lay back with legs bent (sort of like a suspended foetal position) but with hands grasping the pulley and arms straight.


4. If you're going too fast the guide at the platform you're approaching will rapidly perform a punching motion in the air in front of him. This is not his attempt to buffer himself from your impending arrival but your cue to quickly wiggle your pulley from side to side, creating friction with the line. But be sure to do it laterally, not vertically because the latter would not be good. Yikes.


5. When the guide waves his arms across his chest, stop braking.


6. Don't brake unless told to do so. This could result in you stopping before your platform. In which case, see 7.


7. If you stop before the platform, you need to turn yourself around to pull yourself in by your hands. Let go of the pulley with one arm (um right!) and grasp the zip-line in front of you, turning yourself parallel to the line. Then let go of the pulley with the other hand and put it behind the other on the line, turning you around so your back is to the incoming platform. Now, use your arms to pull yourself back the rest of the way to the platform. Remember: You're doing all this while being suspended 500ft in the air, attached to a metal rope by no more than a harness and two caribenas.


8. Trust your guides to know the speed at which you should be coming into the platform.

All of this vital life-or-death information was imparted to us in probably less than 5 minutes - and that includes time for clowning around!

And so, as we head off to platform number one, you saw people repeating back to one another what they thought they just saw and heard (Mum and I among them) in an attempt to (a) obtain validation that you didn't just swap right from left or lateral for vertical in your head and (b) commit the info to something more than short-short term memory.

The adventure started at the stairs up to the first platform. Circular, metal, wobbly, totally transparent, a little narrow, and with not much between you and a thirty-foot drop, I have to say even I wasn't digging it. Stuck behind a line of other people, you were often left with six inches of step and for moments at a time before you could progress; time to re-assess your decision to continue.

Checking back in with Hubbie, I could tell things were not going well. When Joss is scared or worried, he takes on the persona of being pissed. My extremely considerate, diplomatic, sensitive husband turns into a short, sharp, leave-me-alone-or-I'll-jump-all-over-your-ass ,rageaholic. "How's it going, Hun?" is met with a grunt. "Everything ok?" gets a sharp "What do you think!?" and "You can do it!" is the last straw, greeted by some sarcastic **ck off comment.

As I reached the top of the platform and looked back, I saw that poor Hubbie was paralyzed about 6 steps down, almost bent in half with determined concentration. I honestly didn't think he'd make it to platform one. But somehow, in the moment that I turned my back and left him to his own devices (because it was almost my time to get hooked-up) he pushed himself up those stairs and arrived at the top. I don't know how he did it because if I was 6 steps down and the python was at the top, I would have turned without a second thought and raced down screaming and crying like a baby.

Finally, it was time to go. The first line was short and, somehow, I managed to channel the guide's photo-op advice amongst all the 'how-not-to-die' advice and put on my best smile for the camera. Arriving at the other side, I actually had a moment of: This is going to be easy! And you know what? It was! With a couple of notable exceptions...

• Mum's attempt to brake at one specific platform didn't go as-planned and she came zooming in at an alarming speed, swinging violently back-and-forth, side-to-side as she was 'caught' by the guide. I had just arrived in and was waiting for her; for one moment I thought she was going to fly clean off the other side of the platform and/or wrap herself around the zip-line in much the same way you would if you went too high on a swing. Cripes.
• Joss got stuck a couple of times right before the platform... thankfully not 1/2 way across the gorge.
• The hike up to a couple of the platforms involved covering some fairly decent elevations, revealing that Mum seriously needed to get back to the gym. At one point she was so out of breath and so red in the face, Joss tried to use her as an excuse to cut his adventure short to accompany her down the hill.

The lines got progressively longer and the drops beneath you deeper, meaning you started off flying through the trees like a modern-day Tarzan and yet 1/2 way through found yourself emerging over a tropical valley, a river hundreds of feet below, and nothing but you and the zipline in sight. At one point, daring to look around me, I was totally awestruck at the wonder of where I was and what I was doing and let out a giddy "Whoeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" To be so high, with so little holding you up, alone, without the noise of a motor or engine, was absolutely magical - and we got to do it 14 times! Many canopy tours are 5-7 zip-lines but ours was a value-for-money 14. Awesome.

Unfortunately, the adventure didn't stop at platform 14. Hungry and thirsty, we decided to celebrate being alive by grabbing a drink and a quesadilla at the on-site restaurant. Halfway through our cheesy triangles, Hubbie turns to me and says: "Look at that house, Shell." I followed his gaze to stare at a house on the other side of the river. I looked at it and I looked at it but couldn't find anything out-of-the-ordinary to hold my attention. "What am I supposed to be looking at?" I asked him. "Just look at the house!" he urged, which I did obediently but again couldn't see anything. I'm getting pissed now but then I see the look in my mother's eyes. "Don't turn around," she says, which is right about when I realize that the man with the ten foot python is heading in my direction - how close exactly I don't know.

I'll 100% cop to it - I fell apart. Tears, cold-sweats, screaming "Don't let them bring it over here! Make him go away!" Pleading with Hubbie and Mummy "Make them take it away Mum! Nooooo! Pleeeeeeease!"

It was a visceral reaction. Sheer, utter, unreasoned panic, so strong it outweighed my need to not appear like a complete lunatic in front of a room full of strangers. At first they said the guy seemed to think it a little amusing that he was getting a reaction out of me but, as my hysteria grew, he thankfully backed off - only to position himself somewhere between me and my exit out of the restaurant. Leaving the restaurant involved Mum and Hubbie standing between me and the snake, making a visual barrier to enable me to pass-by it and flee up the stairs to safety.

Snakes aside, it's hang-gliding next methinks

Here's me, adventure traveler extraordinaire!