Berta’s Travel Shenanigans

It will never cease to amaze me how, on average, 80% of the small towns in Costa Rica and Nicaragua do not have a working phone – but there are random internet spots.  Hmph?!  Not sure whether this speaks to how the world works today or what – but it can be bloody annoying and at the same time amusing.  So that means that, yes, here I am in a random little Nicaraguan town – Yali- updating my blog – haha, and listening to some cool house music! 

It is about 45 minutes from La Fortuna, the town which we are calling home for at least the next week.  Literally, we wake up in the clouds every morning – its absolutely stunning.  With this altitude also brings a really friggin cold good mornings (as in see your breath) but it gets good and hot by about 10 am, if not earlier.  The last few days have seen us entertain the local children with headstanding abilities (my impressive talents due to synchro and yoga), starting to fill in the floor of the community centre we will be finishing, and having a group ´sleepover´@ the school (a rare time to hang out in the evening it is off to our families by nightfall each day). 

It is quite amazing to see how the families in La Fortuna live off the land and with very little items of ´luxury´ yet are so willing to offer up one of their 3 rooms to us volunteers – where we are living had 22 people living there when our ´dad´was growing up!  We eat every meal and the house, which consists of rice and beans with a rota of eggs, yuka, potatoes, and mystery meat so mysterious we think it might actually be corn.  Admittedly, some of the group is pushed out their comfort zones more than others – e.g. sleeping on wooden planks or tables; hens roosting in their beds; and washing in random, stagnant pools of water 10 minutes from their homes (I fall into this last example!).  We will hopefully finish the community centre (floor, roof, and painting) by the middle of this week.  In that case, we may be moving to nearby Las Laguantas to finish painting a building there. 

On a more personal note, have been planning my travel plans for afterwards and am getting very, very excited!  For our staff party we are heading to Cahuita, which is on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica – and has much more of a Caribbean ´flavour´to it and is meant to be very chilled out and a good party scene 🙂  But it is funny how very few of us are actually missing the booze – its been over 7 weeks of not a single drop of alcohol, can you believe it!  But the parties at the changeovers are so full of energy and fun that you (honestly!) don´t miss it at all. 

Anyhow, after staff party I plan to head to Peurto Viejo and Limon and then down to Bocas del Torres in Panama; back to Costa Rica (will visit Mastatol, Manuel Antonio park, & Jacco, which are by my environmental phase, and Corcovado, the National park where I ended the trekking phase); then I need to get some diving in so perhaps up to Honduras or Belize; and then definitely ending in Guatemala – checking out Tikal and Antigua for some Mayan ruin exploration. 

As always, hope everyone is well and thanks for staying in touch via this blog, facebook, mail, and email – I really appreciate it as … oh, tear!… I have been increasingly more appreciative of what great friends, family, and home I have.  LOTS OF LOVE…Bobbie

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Raleigh phase, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.