Brakes

I was going through some pictures the other day and came acroos this one I took in Costa Rica right before going up 800 feet into the canopy. These are the "brakes" you would use, were you to embark on a zip-line tour of the rainforest canopy.
This is how it works: you get fitted with a basic climber's harness (for the un-initiated, this is a nylon webbing belt with attached leg loops and a loop at your crotch which connects you to whatever keeps you from plummeting to a horrible "SPLAT!" You can figure the rest out from the pictures...), a helmet (not really sure why as you're higher up than really anything that would be heavy enough to do any significant damage to your squash) and a pair of these jobbies. These are leather fingered canvas gardner's gloves that the staff glue leather pads to every morning. As you slide along the zip-line at literally break-neck speed (maybe they should have given us neck-guards rather than helmets, hmmm) you hold one hand on the cord keeping you on the line and one hand behind you on the line itself to a) keep you from spinning out of control and b) slow yourself to a reasonable speed as you approach the "landing pad" (imagine the ewok villiage from Return of the Jedi--that's the image).

Now, funny story regarding the misuse of said "brakes". While we were at the resort, there was a photo shoot occurring for some swim-wear catalog. Photographers and models and various members of the entourage that tried to appear as if they had some incredibly important and arcane purpose that involved consuming massive amounts of native beer and making a spectacle of themselves--you get the picture. On Saturday, apparently, they had the day off and, regretably, disappeared to go terrorize some corner of the country that was not the resort. On Sunday, two of the entourage appeared at breakfast not only hung over (which was really not all that remarkable) bust also, mysteriously, clad in fresh casts.

It took some doing and a good deal of shameless gossiping amongst the rest of the guests, but we were able to finally able to peice together the story: these two fashionista wanna-bes thought that it would be a good idea to pound Bloody Marys prior to starting out on this adventure through the jungle as they figured that there might not be any booze in the wild. As a result, these two geniuses didn't bother to listen during the safety spiel and couldn't figure out that they actually needed to do something to prevent SLAMMING into the platform or, God-forbid , the tree it was attached to and inflicting immense bodily harm to one's own body, and .... CRACK! Yeah, you guesed it. And the best was, one watched the other one do it and then proceeded to do the exact same thing on the next line!

The moral of the story: in, well, every place other than here, where we are raised as removed from any real danger as possible, the safety spiel is a good thing to listen to; activities involving high speeds and gloves as your main method of stopping do not mix with large amounts of alcohol; and basically pay attention and respect your surroundings...enough said.