Posted on 03/22/2010 6:32:22 AM PDT by rawhide
More than 1,300ft above the roaring Rio Negro in Colombia, nine-year-old Daisy Mora prepares to throw herself over the abyss.
Attaching herself to an old and rusted pulley system she drops over the edge before plummeting at 40mph along a zip wire to the opposite bank half a mile away - a vertigo-inducing journey she has to take every day to get to school.
For the handful of families living in the area, 40 miles southeast of the capital Bogota, the 12 steel cables that connect one side of the valley to the other are their only access to the outside world.
German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was the first Westerner to observe the unusual rope system in 1804.
They were traditionally made of hemp, but steels cables were installed with the advent of logging in the surrounding rainforest. When this was made illegal settlers turned their hand to farming and cattle raising.
Farmers use them to transport goods to and from the closest town and, for children like Daisy and her five-year-old brother Jamid, it is how they get to school. Jamid is too young to safely ride the wire on his own, so she has to carry him with her in a jute bag, controlling their speed with a wooden fork.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
-—and phy ed consists of the trip home—
Amazing little girl with her 5-yr old brother riding along in a cloth bag. Amazing!
So how do they get back? Is there an even higher set of wires further up?
How do they get back the other way?
Villagers hook themselves to steel wires and slide”
Does that mean the bearings in the rollers are all frozen?
So what...
When I was a kid we had to do it both ways uphill in the snow....
Kids have it so easy now....
Also:
German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was the first Westerner to observe the unusual rope system in 1804.
So, in 1804 the natives were making hemp ropes half a mile long and using these for transportation? And (I suppose) had worked out the mechanism to maintain tension and a pulley system for return trips. That surprises me.
I can see these kids when they’re grandparents:
“Back in my day, we used to zip wire to school, a quarter mile, up hill...both ways!”
The zip lines go ACROSS a valley. Doesn’t take much of a drop in elevation to make it work. It probably take just a very short hike up the other side of the valley to make the return trip. A short hike up a valley is pretty easy for the return trip.
These kids are lucky...most of us would have to enlist somewhere to do this kind of stuff.
I guess they don't have federal judges mandating busing to solve the problem. But then our federal mandates were never about facilitating travel to school.
My favorite comment in the whole article:
Jamid is too young to safely ride the wire on his own, so she has to carry him with her in a jute bag...
Daisy is mature at nine.
Rope bridges have a VERY long history in the Andes. The Incas used them extensively. Andean civilizations were probably the most rope/textile oriented in history. Even their system of writing was encoded in knotted ropes.
Looks very plain in the first picture that the man on the right is descending to this side. I imagine when they installed the cabling the engineers would have thought about that.
Never understood why people complained about the Army when people actually take vacation time to go camping and hiking in the woods; and the Army gives you 30 days of vacation to go do it some more on your own time.
That explains how you could get back, but it does not solve the problem of how you get the pulleys that you ride down back to the original side. Also, the photo shows a pretty wicked looking creek down at the bottom.
I think the pulley system has to have a way to pull yourself back up the line when you go home. If I was writing the story, I would have found out and explained it as it is the most obvious question. The idiot reporters of the world have no curiosity anymore.
Man O man. Get that hair caught in the pulley at 40 MPH.
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