Berta’s Travel Shenanigans

Alright, where to begin?! I have been in Turrialba at the Raleigh field base for 16 days…wow! What has happened? More importantly, what has not?!

Field base is quite a lovely experience really, especially considering no expectations were established @ all. We are staying on a farm/agricultural university area that has an amazing view of the Volcano Turrialba. Although food is heavily concentrated around ‘gallo pinto’ (rice and beans) it is surprisingly good. I am improving my spanish (e.g. ‘el sol es delissioso’…the sun is delicious) and my tan 🙂

I’ve been assigned to do a 19 day trek/hike with a former marine commander with the nickname “GI Nick”…yes, that has been an adventure. We headed out on our pre-project planning (just Nick and I) that, in a nutshell, consisted of:

having a dip in some hotsprings (aguas terminales); walking 1km uphill in 37 degree heat; seeing some kind of wild cat which scared the shit out of me; becoming a trained navigating ninja (back-bearing anyone?); having no communication with field base for 3 days (couldn’t get the radio to work, wasn’t told the pin number for the Sat phone, and was the only trekking group not to have a GPS); full-on machete action through the jungle and sliding down muddy banks on me arse; resorting to drinking the juice from the fruit salad because we had no water to even cook our porridge in; setting up a tent on top of a high ridge, on a farm, next to a barb-wire fence after 12 hours (6 am – 6 pm) of straight trekking (including scaling the side of a ridge in the dark with a head torch…remember, no radio, absolutely no people around…not that Nick or I speak spanish in any case)…

hmm, I think that about sums it up. The country director had to come and look for us (in hopes of avoiding a full scale search party) and we were quite pleased to see the truck rolling up this rather steep hill…we got some burgers and milkshakes out of the deal. Quite amusing now I must say. Can’t wait to get back out there with 12 impressionable young people … best part is the trek ends at the beach in Corcovado national park, which is in the very south of Costa Rica; the trek also comes very close to the Panamanian border. Will be doing about 6-9 hours of hiking a day and am v.excited to get wipped into shape.

Went whitewater rafting on Monday on the Pacuare River…AMAZING! Such a great time, will post pics once I get the underwater camera developed. Even jumped out of the boat to go down the last rapid. Except wasn’t quite expecting to jump straight onto a bunch of rocks and was ‘this close’ to busting my knee and getting a compound fracture. Good times. Oh well, not being able to breath going down the rapid became a relatively non-issue b/c I was reeling from the pain in my legs 🙂

The people on the expedition are amazing and I am slowly picking up the UK lingo (for example, commenting on how dirty my pants were after my pre-project planning invited some confused looks…pants = underwear…have since been conscious to say trousers). Last night was the final evening for alcohol so everyone pretty well tied one on and I did some hefty salsa dancing. Today, some of the host-country participants will arrive and tomorrow there will be 117 young people swarming around Field Base, which will be AB-SOL-UTELY chaotic. I head out for the 19 days on the 5th of Februrary, we return for a 3 day changeover, and then I hope to be heading into Nicaragua for a community project for the second phase of the expedition.

I hope everyone is well and love hearing from you all – I will try and update this again before I head out on the trek and am without any communication to the ‘real world’ for 20 days!

Pura Vida!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under January 2008, 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.