We had to sit and wait for well over 4 hours but it was fine as we had lots to talk about. Finally at around 5pm the Costa Rican hosts Mal and Arlene arrived to take us to the British School, not far from the airport where we were staying in the gym for the evening. We got there and we all got chatting to the other venturers including the Costa Rican venturers. I quickly discovered who I would be befriending and it was a lovely group of girls including the 2 I met at the airport, Liv and Tash who also happened to be twins and who are British but live in Washington DC as their Dad is a Diplomat. Pretty cool right?
We had sandwiches with ham and plastic cheese for dinner and biscuits before setting up camp for the night for our first night of many sleeping on our roll mats on hard floors. The group I was with ended up staying up well past 11pm (everyone else was fast asleep) gossiping about normal girl stuff but we soon decided we'd be knackered if we didn't sleep soon.
We had a 6am wake up call and we left the school for Turriabla which was around 2 hours away and it's safe to say I slept the majority of the way. We arrived at the Catie field base, which is an indigenous area where Raleigh International are based in Costa Rica and it's also a research area. Before being given a tour of the camp we had a traditional breakfast of beans, rice, caramelised plantain, papaya and scrambled eggs. This isn't something I'd usually pick but I rather enjoyed it although papaya and egg do not mix (NB do not try this at home).
We were then given the rules and there were 4:
- No alcohol or drugs ever
- No forms of communication e.g phones
- No climbing trees
- No riding horses
We were also given groups in which we would sleep in at the 'resort' I was in the biggest camp (pretty much an army marquee) and I was with all the girls I had made friends with. We were then taken to the local swimming pool for a swimming test, I swear I'm not still at school, guess it's for insurance reasons right. Later in the day we got the opportunity to go to the local supermarket, MaxiPali (you'll later learn this was something we would count down the days for) and we had our last chance to buy things of normality. I got M&Ms, a banana and a fizzy lemon drink.
For dinner that evening we had rice, beans, palm heart and veg. All these carbs will be disaster for my poor thighs and then my first of many MANY cold showers.
The following day we had an even earlier wake up call of 5am, not sure I'll be able to get used to this. We had a surprisingly delicious breakfast of porridge, I'm not the biggest fan of this normally due to past experiences but I loved it especially with cinamon and sugar. After breakfast we were told which groups we would be in for our project phase and I was so happy that I was with Tash (the girl I met at the airport). Our group was Delta 3. There was no one else I knew in the group but we had a wide variety of international people. From top left; Hubert (French), Arlenne (Costa Rican and our Project Manager), Tash (English but lives in DC), Hila (Israeli), Mundev (English but originally from India), Ollie (English but lives in Majorca), Mike (English and our other PM), Lucy (originally English but has never lived there has lived in Sweden, Russia and now in Switzerland). Bottom left: me, Rhian (Welsh), Sylvia (Costa Rican) and Jess (Northern Ireland. We also had another Tico, Greivin, who's not in the picture.
We were then told we would be heading off that day to a jungle camp and a practice river crossing for the evening, so we quickly packed our bags appropriately and then distributed the group kit and sure I drew the short straw as I ended up carrying a four man tent (please note the size of my bag in the picture) and poor Tash carried the Comms kit (very heavy).
We left around lunchtime so the midday heat was at it's hottest, not the best conditions. Within 10 minutes I had pretty much sweated through my tshirt and this was with no hills, then we hit a very steep downhill around an hour later which took us to our river crossing where we learnt how to cross the river safely in groups of 4.
It was a boring and slow activity but because we were so hot it was nice to get to go in the water. It was here we also stopped for lunch, which was crackers (which crushed in my bag) and puréed refried beans (yum) which I decided I would not be eating.
Later that day we arrived at Jungle camp, which looked like we should be on 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here'. We were shown how to create a basher hammock and a basher bed using tarpaulin, string, bamboo, trees and stretcher material.
Luckily our group managed to put these up fairly quickly as soon after the rain came and good grief did it pour. There was earth-shattering thunder, lightening, torrential rain, gallons on mud and of course millions of bugs yay. Everyone wanted to sleep in the basher bed shown in the picture above and so we picked cards and I won and I managed to have a relatively dry night with only a bit of rain getting in.
The next day we were up at 4am, why does it keep getting earlier? And surprise surprise it was still raining. We had porridge for breakfast before packing everything up and heading back to field base, everyone was covered in mud and soaked through to our packs. So naturally you'd expect people to be miserable but there is nothing you can do to change the weather so there is no point complaining.
On the way back the Mike and Arlenne set up a scenario where Arlenne had broken her leg and we had to, as a team coordinate a rescue and we had to assign roles for everyone in the group. It was pretty stressful and it was still raining but it was good practice in case we had a situation like this during trek or project.
After returning to fieldbase, we had to wash out the tents and hang them up to dry, have training on how to use the Comms kit and also how to use the tools for project. We then separated our team food for our trek the following day to project and then had free time, during which I signed up to take pictures for the blog and write some of the blog posts which you may have seen.
For the entire night the rain continued and most of the 'resorts' were flooded, thankfully ours wasn't. We had an early dinner and then a treat of hot orange which we drank out of our mess tins.
It was then an early night in preparation for our trek to Koiyaba, our location of our project phase.
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