Mambo Combo

The travel company we are using for some of our Costa Rica a trips provided a tour known as ‘Mambo Combo' in Arenal. It is a consists of canyoning in the early morning and white water rafting in class III rapids in the afternoon. A pretty full day but it sounded like fun so we had booked it some time ago

Canyoning

We had only read about canyoning when researching Costa Rica but it sounded interesting. Basically it is a way to navigate down a mountain via climbing, jumping and abseiling via the water route. So you follow a stream of water which has cut as route down they mountain. It’s a really fun way to get really really wet and do some abseiling while feeling like an intrepid explorer. They picked us up from our hotel at 6:45 and took us via some serious off-roading to our starting point. We were joined by only one other person on the tour, a Canadian man named Alan who was great fun.

It was a small group so we had the guides to ourselves. We did some training on a few small rappels to get a feel for the technique. But they wasted no time getting us soaking wet 💦💦 there were a series of ever increasing abseiling sections with the longest being 300 meter abseil at the end. In between there were rock pools we had to jump in, streams to follow and mini waterfalls to climb down.

The guides are really good and you known they are serious about safety so you feel confident when they tell you what to do. The trail in right through the rain forest and it’s really dense jungle so you get the feeling like no one else has explored it before. Your own secret route through the jungle

Rafting

The second part of our combo was the white water rafting. Here we joined up with a bigger group and we each split into groups of six with a guide and a raft. We got the basics of rafting and the safety lessons in what to do if someone went over board while we were on the river. Then off we went and started getting training from our guide on how to respond to his instructions to paddle through the rapids.

We picked the medium difficulty rapids given that we had no previous experience but the still proved to be challenging enough and offered plenty of testing sections

On one of the rapids we lost two of our crew over board. Jennifer nearly went as well since it was her side of the boat that tipped but I just managed to grab her life jacket before she went over. The guide still needs to steer the boat through the rapids so we needed to get the others in quickly before they got bounced around some nasty rocks

I nearly made things worse trying to grab the remaining member of our crew and almost fell out of the boat except Jennifer grabbed me and stopped me from going in

At the time it was very nerve wrecking but we did have a laugh about it once everyone was back in the boat and we had got through those particular rapids and were back on dry land.

Next on the list is ziplining and then off to Monteverde where we have a coffee your and nature walk booked. Which, hopefully, will be a little more peaceful than some of our activities recently 😁