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 ...
“but it does not solve the problem of how you get the pulleys that you ride down back to the original side.”
Disconnect the pulley from the eastbound wire, take it with you to the wesbound wire, connect it to that. Downhill all the way.
yes. This was on Television about a year or so ago. There are wires making the return trip as well.
If you are going 40 mph, hair getting in the pulley isn’t a problem.
oh—my 86-year old dad every now and then brings up this skit in conversation... good stuff!
The pulleys are detachable.
Wow! Here in the WDC area they close schools when there is a snow cloud in Idaho because they are worried about the school buses slipping or something. Nanny state Ping.
At that height nothing at the bottom looks friendly.
Their success is manifest by the continuing endurance of the Inca empire. ;^(
It’s coming from a reporter, who thinks this trip is scary when most kids would think it’s awesome.
Turns out a textile-based civilization doesn’t do well up against a metal-based civilization.
Even so, Pizarro would probably have been wiped out if the Empire hadn’t just gone thru a smallpox epidemic with a death toll around that of the Black Death in Europe.
Good lord this is awful”
What are her parents thinking , why isn’t she wearing a helmet ?
</Helicopter parent>
Ping for later.
lolz beat me to it.
—yep-—the principles of physics still apply, even in Columbia—
They’re getting high speed rail courtesy Obammy’s stimulus package.
Intense.
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