Life in Miami Beach

As I walk towards the hallway to the Immigration and Customs department at the Miami International Airport, several signs gave a warm welcome to the “Sunny City”, as this great city of the State of Florida is popularly known, in the United States.

As I exit the airport, a hot wind current hits me, surrounding me and giving me a warm welcome. Without me even noticing, a very proactive airport employee calls me a cab, and a very polite driver opens the door of his car.

A 15-minute drive through the freeway towards my hotel, where you can see some of the neighborhoods down below, and far away with the sea in between, the huge buildings and skyscrapers from the city.

Some small boats and ferries float slowly and calmly in the waters of the Miami Canal, as my taxi drove down an exit lane, towards the downtown area, and after a couple of rounds, I was arriving at my hotel. You can find good hotels in the Downtown area, near cafes and bars.

As I get hungry, I decide to leave my room and go out to get something to eat and check out the sights.

When I get out on the street, at first, I begin to walk with the distrust that the traveler feels when stepping a strange and unknown city, although I came here once before, when I was a little kid, with my family. Asides from a couple memories, I have no recollection of that trip whatsoever.

Passersby go about their business as they walked past me, and waiters and busboys try to get my attention by being friendly and citing the full menus of their restaurants. There is every single kind of food you can imagine: from Sushi and Arepas, to arabian cuisine and the all-American McDonald's and Kentucky Fried-Chicken.

As I walk, a wide diversity of stores appear on both sides of the street: from electronic appliances and gadgets to clothes, pharmacies and small super markets.

Two aspects that caught my attention: Unlike the city where I am from, cars would slow down as a person would cross a street, and a homeless person was watching video on his laptop, as he prepared to go to bed in one of the many streets of the city.

I went back to my hotel, since I had to work the next day, thinking that my visit to this coast city would have to wait for the day after.

After a long day of working, photographing the music event of popular latin musicians called "Premios Lo Nuestro", I was out on the city again, to get a last glimpse of it, before going back to my home country.

Walking opposite what I had been the previous days, I stumbled upon a mall on the side of the sea called “Bayside Mall”, that was also a yacht club and pier. There, a music group played songs from their music album on a stage next to the bay, in a really cool small concert, and I thought “well, this is the real world of music in the street”.

There you could see a wide assortment of offers on boat trips that could take all over the Miami bay area, and also to check out the houses of the rich and famous, which were built on the seaside, and could range from celebrities such as Shakira to Al Pacino.

After spending some time at the bay, I hailed for a cab to take me to South Beach, where I wanted to walk and take some pictures for a while.

A quick five minute ride over a couple of bridges to the beach, where I could see the true freedom of the floridians: A lot of people enjoying a sunny day at the beach, exercising, bathing at the sea or sunbathing in the sand during a “working day”. But life in Miami is also expensive since this city, alongside New York, are the most costly cities in the United States. Still, Miami can offer a wide array of entertainment to the traveler, that can last you a lifetime.

During the night, the city glows with ts skyscrapers lit up in neon colors, while its streets are crowded with tourists looking for parties, food, drinks and fun. There are boats with the word “Fiesta” written on their sides (fiesta is the spanish word Party), that offer rides all over the bay while you drink and dance aboard.

Miami is the ultimate cosmopolite city, where you can enjoy sandy and sunny beaches, streets full of discos and bars, and all the kind of food and fun you want.

 

Rafting in Guatemala

Upon descending from the main Street of El Naranjo village, a community of less than a thousand inhabitants located on the southern department of Escuintla, a region known for its warm climate and its proximity to the ocean, you could hear the mumbling of the Coyolate River, which passes next to this place.

According to Wikipedia, The Coyolate is a river that is almost 100 miles in length and located on the southwest of the country, flows from the mountaintops of the Sierra Madre in the north all the way down to the Pacific Ocean. It is also ideal for practicing the sport of rafting.

After arriving to the riverbank, one detail caught my eye: The crews of local men, members of the Naranjo community, inflating the boats were doing so in a way that demonstrated they knew the Know-hows of the process and that they had experience in this kind of thing before.

“Welcome to El Naranjo and the Coyolate River, this is rafting and if you do not attend to the instructions, it can be very dangerous” said Roberto Rodas, one of our guides who was standing next to the gear we will be using.

Rafting, as you may know, is a recreational and sporting activity that consists on traveling the causeway of the river on a boat downstream. Although is considered an extreme sport, nowadays it is also use as a tool to help preserve and look out for the rivers and their ecosystem, promote this preservation, and to help in the development of the communities established next to these bodies of water and last but not least, attract and stimulate all sorts of tourism.

Ready, set… Let's paddle

After the security talk (where our guides tell us the do´s and don’ts of rafting), and a few paddling practice, we were ready to embark on this adventure. Aided by the strong current of the river it 

wasn´t long, not even after two minutes, that we encountered a first rapid. Rapids are sections of a river where the riverbed has a relatively steep gradient, causing an increase in water velocity and turbulence.

The strength of the rapid caused the raft to be thrown in the air, only to fall back hard over the water. Julio, one of my companions fell on the water, and immediately implemented the emergency procedures taught by our guides: Adopt a fetal position, grab the paddle strongly and let the current take you a safe area of the river where you can swim to the shore. I myself was amazed that I didn't fell off the boat due to the strong fall. It was my first time doing this.

Julio swam to shore, got up on the raft again and confessed between laughter this was the first time he had ever fell off the boat doing rafting. After a small celebration by crashing the paddles over head, we headed back out to the river. The current stood still for a little while, and then it got really strong carrying us at a tremendous speed down the river.

After turning a delta on the river, an ominous sight appeared in front of our raft: A giant boulder standing still and strong in the middle of the river, a rock that had withstand the force of the current from maybe years, centuries or millennia ago without moving. It stood there, daring us to try and cross the portion of the river where it was from a long time ago.

Our guide, Roberto Rodas, shouted instructions while he maneuvered to try and pass the rock. The raft came dangerously closed to the boulder, not crashing into it but more like being shoved aside, as if the boulder said “okay, I'll let you pass just because I want to”. As the boat passed next to the giant rock, we discovered that it was as big as a car.

Sometimes our guide, Roberto, will shout instructions that we had to paddle backwards to rectify the course of the raft, so it could pass between rocks, head in the right way, or take a little shortcut. Other times, we would paddle backwards to avoid a tree trunk stuck in the riverbed or other obstacles.

I was astounded by the nature and life that surrounded us and existed because and in the river. Sometimes you would see shoals of flying fish jumping out of the water here or there, other times you would see a stork or a bird flying over the water trying to get a prey.

This sport is really exciting and full of adrenaline, and the effort put into rowing or paddling will strain every muscle in your body. Is a team sport too, because you depend on your teammates or companions in the raft, as well as they depend on you whether it is to save your life, help you if you're injured, get lost and so that the same doesn't happen to them.

Consciousness for the river´s ecosystem

Roberto Rodas is a former agricultural engineer that traded a life in an office for a life in the outdoors as an extreme sportsman and rafting guide. He currently works for an organization called R.I.O.S. Guatemala; an acronym that forms the Spanish word for rivers and that in this language stands for Recreación (Recreation), Investigación (Investigation), Observación (Observation) and Sostenibilidad (Sustainability). This Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) is an initiative dedicated to the preservation of the rivers and their ecosystem, the teaching of the importance of the bodies of water and why they should be preserved, especially to communities and enterprises located nearby or that may use the river´s causeways in some sort of way, and to attract investment on infrastructure and tourism to develop programs of community tourism.

Basically, by means of rafting and other water extreme sports, the organization hopes to develop self-aware and self-sustainable communities that benefit from exploiting the resource of the river on this kind of tourism.

By the international standards of Rafting, The Coyolate is a category 3 river although some portions of it are considered category 4. In Guatemala there are several rivers that are navigable and with potential to develop all kind of extreme sports and these are: The Cahabón, The Nahualate, The Coyolate and Los Esclavos (The Slaves), this last one considered as the most dangerous of the country, since it has a classification of a 4 plus category.