Kid Rides A Zip Line To School

Transportation is challenging for people living in the mountains around the Rio Negro in Colombia. For more than two hundred years, the only way in or out of this area has been by zip line. Even school-age children ride it a half-mile every day to attend classes.

Kids travel to school via a precarious, high-altitude zipline of 1,300ft, carrying their younger sibs in hemp sacks and slowing their descent with a wooden fork.

Take Daisy May for example, a 9-year-old girl who lives atop Colombia's Rio Negro valley and ziplines half a mile to school at speeds up to 40 mph. 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.

It's a high pressure journey, with a 400m drop into the Rio Negro river facing her if the pulley system gives way.