On our last full day in Costa Rica we decided to go on another tour led by Rios Tropicales. This time we let them take us on one of their popular river raft trips down the Paquare River. Like the ocean kayak trip, they picked us up at the door of our hotel and drove us to the top of the river, picked us up at the bottom of the river, and took us back to our hotel. We specifically asked for our ocean kayak guide, Paloma, but he was unavailable. Instead Maryly and I ended up in the boat with another lead guide who also had his girlfriend along with him. I think this had an effect on the quality of the ride we got. All the other rafts on this particular trip got knocked over in one rapid or another, but our boat never got knocked over once. I have long suspected that getting knocked over in the river is one of the attractions of these trips and that guides do it on purpose at some time on each trip. But our guide was showing off to his girlfriend and kept her (relatively) dry on this trip.
At one place on the river the walls came in very close together, but the channel was very deep. This was a place that was scheduled to be dammed to crate a hydroelectric generating plant. There was a lot of outcry at this and last I have heard the dam on the Paquare River has been indefinitely delayed. Because of the deepness of the water, the water was quite calm and those of us who had not been out of our boats were invited to jump in here and swim along with the boat for a while.
None of us, even those in the boat that never got turned over, were less than sopping wet of course. Water still broke over all of us on every rapid. There were a half a dozen safety kayakers escorting us down the river. Sometimes they would go ahead and scout out the rapids for our guides and signal back where the safest channels were. One of them would get way ahead on the roughest rapids and take pictures of us as we got drenched going over the falls. We chose to buy a few of those pictures and I scanned them into this journal when they finally arrived.