Zip Lining

Equipped with only a harness, a hardhat and one very thick leather glove, you too can fly through a rainforest canopy! Zip lining is a popular activity for exploring hard-to-reach areas like rainforests, but they’ve also been used historically—especially in Australia—as a means for transporting equipment and food to workers on the other side of a large river or a canyon. Zip lines, or “flying foxes” in Australia, consist of a cable positioned on an incline to allow gravity to propel a rider along the cable.

In popular canopy tours in places like Costa Rica and Belize, a rider wears a harness that attaches directly to a trolley on the cable; they jump off a platform and fly through the air. Zip liners usually wear a thick leather glove with which to grasp the cable to slow them down as they arrive at the next platform. Zip line canopy tours tend to involve a series of multi-level platforms where people can zip from one to the next to see different areas of the rainforest.