Iguana Park Canopy Tour

Our first excursion out of San Jose -- on about
three hours' sleep -- was to Iguana Park,
located about 30 miles west of the capital,
towards the Pacific.  Even getting there had
its exciting moments (see picture at right).

Iguana Park is a small rainforest and also
an iguana breeding facility.  They are trying to
protect iguanas by making them more
important economically, i.e. by trying to
convince local cattle farmers to farm
iguanas instead.  (We are not making this up.)

The claim is that iguanas produce twelve times
as much meat per acre as beef cattle.  And of course, they taste like chicken. 

In this picture, Alice, who loathes snakes, conquers her
 old fears and contemplates a career move into the fast-
growing, lucrative, and dynamic field of iguana farming.

Note the carabiners and straps on her pants.  After some reptile quality time, we hiked through the forest and up a hillside, then zipped through the treetops, flying from platform to platform, 120' up.  The vegetation that you see at the bottom of the pictures below is the tops of the trees growing up from the jungle floor.  Each segment of zip line was about 200 ft.

Upon reaching the last platform the only
way to go was straight down, so after a
30-second lesson in rappelling, down
we went....