White Water Rafting near La Fortuna

White Water Rafting is the only thing we did in Costa Rica that I don't have pictures from. It's kind of hard to take your camera along on the rapids. The rafting company took 80-some pictures of us, but I had already purchased a photo package from the zip line company the previous day, so I opted out of the rafting pictures.

Rio Balsa is near the town of La Fortuna. Our trip coincided with the beginning of the rainy season in Costa Rica, so the river was at a good level. The river offers both a Class IV section as well as a Class II and III section. We opted for the latter for two reason - one, none of us had ever been white water rafting before, and two, there is a minimum age of 12 to do the Class IV tour. Our daughter was 10. (There is a min. age of 8 for the Class II/III tour).

We were picked up at our resort and taken into La Fortuna where the bus picked up a few additional people at the company's headquarters. From there we drove about 40 minutes to the put-in.

Each raft accommodates six people plus the guide, so we had a boat to ourselves which was very nice.

For this particular tour, there was no breaking in period for us first-time rafters. Immediately after putting in we were in the midst of the rapids. We had a great time navigating through the rapids while staying safe as well.

We stopped at a couple of locations to observe sloths and a poison dart frog. We also saw several types of herons.

We were on the river for approximately two hours. After rafting we were driven to a sugar cane farm where we enjoyed a native lunch of rice and chicken with beans and fruit juice. The lunch stop included a presentation about how they make sugar cane juice and sugar cane "moonshine" with samples of both.

The entire tour lasted approximately five hours and was one of many highlights of our trip.