Earlier this year I saw a YouTube video of Jimmy Fallon and Black Thought (from The Roots) zip lining in PR from about 5 years ago. He is featured all over the place there!

I have had it in mind as a great thing to do in central PR next time we were around and.. we’re here! After some safety and sanity debate amongst our little crew, we reserved a Season Pass, which is a highly discounted four person package to do any four zipline activities. Topping the list are The Beast, which is 1.45 km (0.9 mi) long at up to 97 kph (60 mph) and The Monster, which is the second longest in the world at 2.5 km (1.5 mi) at up to 95 mph (153 kph). Both have a maximum height of around 380 m (1246.7 ft). They start on higher peaks and drop over rivers and craggy spires to lower peaks. After hours of waiting Ashok & Leanna did The Beast then Ashok & I did The Monster, while Savitri took pictures and caught up on streaming (she’s super afraid of heights). Ashok and I took turns wearing the Insta360 x4 clipped onto our helmets to record the whole thing. I’ve extracted a mostly-forward view from each of those, dewarped them (projecting from a sphere to a rectangle) and reduced the resolution (each original clip is 16GB!) to post here. It was raining intermittently so the lens got water droplets on them, but I kind of feel like they lend a sense of authenticity to the videos!

But.. I’m getting way ahead of myself. First we had to drive 1.5 hours southwest into almost the exact center of the island. PR has tons of limestone so it’s one jagged hill after another and driving is a constant series of tight turns going steeply up and downhill. There are a lot of fairly large box trucks as well, and lots of construction. The forest surrounding the roads is very lush, and often forms a solid wall of greenery against the road. The last 10-15 minutes of the drive however emerged from the trees into hilltop pastures and amazing views for miles in every direction.

First step is to get our zip lining helmets and harnesses on. These two ziplines are done in Superman mode, so hanging horizontal from two straps attached to your back. This requires a sling harness. The helmets are definitely not for falling since you are WAY up there, but they do help if you bang your head on the platforms or cable, which is entirely possible.

For The Monster you then have to climb a tall tower and wait.. ~5 minutes a person so hours!

The views are pretty good though, even caught some rainbows!

Here are our zipline videos!

The Season Pass also includes a $50 food voucher so we ate there afterward and were actually quite surprised to find that the food, beverages, and service were all excellent! We apparently didn’t take any pictures of the table.. always a good sign. We did pose in front of this verde toro though so.. there’s that.

After we returned to Old San Juan, we went out and tried one last time to visit Mr Kuki’s. Mr Kuki’s is a cookie and ice cream shop nearby that Ashok & Leanna have stopped by several times, but due to the time or power (the power has been going out in waves for sections of the city all week for some reason), we hadn’t actually gotten any cookies yet. Well this time we did! The ice cream proved to be brought in and looked fairly generic so we got four of their huge cookies and brought them back to split up at our AirBnB. YUMM!