Eight days.

Get a cuppa and a comfy seat. This is a long one.

Day One.
After staying up until 1.15am writing my last personal blog post, I was up at 3.30am. I got on the bus with Project Managers Charlotte and Sylvie and their Alpha One group to the starting point of their trek at El Progresso, somewhere around here.

One amazing thing about Costa Rica is how easy it is for trekkers to find somewhere to stay. You basically rock up and ask the local shopkeeper if you can camp in a public flat green area that every settlement, no matter how small has. For free. Can you imagine that happening in the UK or Ireland? Yeah right. It would take at least 20 emails, three meetings and a minimum fee of a fiver per person.

The local shopkeeper said we could camp on grass for free or stay in an area with a swimming pool, shower and toilet for 1000CRN (2USD or 1.22GBP). We opted for the latter, set up our sleeping area, chilled, had dinner via Trangias, and were in bed by 7.30pm. I went to sleep to the sound of the Venturers playing cards against the sound of the jungle. The last thing I saw before closing my eyes was the stars through my mozzie net. Magic.

One of the Venturers said that one of her earliest memories was rushing home from school to watch High School Musical. I was in university when that came out. Ho hum.

Alpha One!

#justchillin

Day Two.

Got up at 4am and kicked of the day with energy bombs for breakfast - that's porridge, condensed milk, chocolate powder with optional nuts and raisins. We set off trekking at 6.15am. We walked up a big ass hill, saw a snake, completed two river crossings, saw an orange tree, and hacked through jungle with a machete to find the path the route card told us we should be on.

We stayed at a ranch that night, which was like a little community. It's called Alturas, but it's not on the map. Again with the asking locally if we could camp, to which they directed us to a lovely spot by the river. They also had a shower and toilet behind their shop which they told us we could use.

I went to the shop all by myself, and using barely there Spanish with an Irish twang (Hiberno-Spanish?) and the international language of Pointing, I managed to buy Coke, crisps and chocolate. This was a very big deal for me.

It was funny listening to the Venturers during the day. One started talking about some rapper, then asked if I knew who they were, and I hadn't a clue. #oldfart

Day Three.

Up again at 4am. Walked. Lots of hills. Not a particularly eventful day. Encountered a severed bull's head in a cage, but nobody seemed to have any ideas of why. There was a lovely hot spring on the way to our camping area for the night.

We were ahead of time, so managed to splash about there for a good hour. Then it was another kilometre uphill to the camping area, which was a community centre next to a bull ring, in a place called Aguas Callientes, which I couldn't find on Google Maps. It was nothing like the Bullring back in Birmingham. We slept under our mozzie nets under a sheltered part outside the community centre. The rain hitting the roof of the shelter, combined with the general wildlife noise was something special.

A couple of scorpions were spotted. Apparently a couple of police officers arrived up in the middle of the night to warn us against snakes and robbers. Which was odd because we'd already been told we could stay there. Whatever, I slept through it.

Day Four.

My final day with Alpha One mostly involved hills. Lots of hills. Specifically a big ass 3.5km hill at the end, which lead us to the ranger's station at Pittier, super-near the border with Panama, where we were to stay that night, and where we would meet a road trip from Fieldbase who would bring food, stay with us that night, and who I would depart with the next day.

We got to the ranger's station in plenty of time to shower and rest before the arrival of the road trip, which comprised Deputy Programme Manager Blue, and JJ and Sarah from the Logistics team. There was food and lols and bed. Here's a picture of some scenery from ranger's station.

Day Five.

Despite repeated pleas from Alpha One, I bade them farewell, having walked about 36km with them, and cementing a reputation for being able to sleep anywhere, such as the side of a Costa Rican road during a rest break. The road trip was to drop off food for them at four places along the rest of Alpha One's route. I saw lots of pretty scenery, which ended at Carate beach. That's karate with a c. There was an airstrip there that people were saying was used in Jurassic Park. Except there is no airstrip in Jurassic Park! The only thing I could think of was that it might have been Jurassic Park III, but that film wasn't very good. Anyway, they had a badass a lizard there.

When we pulled up at our final food drop contact's house, after being on the road for 10 hours, his Canadian neighbour who owned the land came over to chat. He had started building a shelter at the back of the property and told us we could stay there. There was a toilet and shower we could use, and he even brought us some mattresses. Sometimes some randomer will come along and restore your faith in humanity for a bit. We cooked dinner on the beach as the sun went down, and slept in the shelter under our mozzie nets.

The sunset was too beautiful. I felt like somebody should have to do something to deserve to see such beauty, and I still don't know what I did to deserve to see it. It was like something from a film, not somewhere people like me who are brought up grounded in the real world ever find themselves. We mostly sat in silence, but not an uncomfortable silence for people who only met a month ago. As the sun gradually went down, more stars appeared across the sky.

Lying under my mozzie net, I could hear the sounds of the rainforest in a mash up with the Pacific's crashing waves. Clouds had come, but I could still see the occasional star peek through. Sweating like a pig, wearing just my boxers, to hot to get into my sleeping bag, or even my sleeping bag liner, I worried that I might forget these memories, and that bothers me.

 

Day Six.

Sarah reckoned that at about 2am the night before, some dude had been at the entrance to the shelter looking over us with a head torch. Creepy. JJ said she woke up annoyed that somebody had their torch on, but when she opened her eyes it was the moon.

Had a delightful steak for breakfast, and spent eight hours driving to Puntarenas, where we met Home Country Volunteer Coordinator Ani, and got the boat to San Lucas, where the Alpha Five group, with Project Managers Tony and Ailsa, were working on an environmental project. They showed us their camp, brought us to a beach for a barbecue, and brought us to sleep on the pier, in the open air, without even a mozzie net, just our sleeping bags and roll mats, and the stars and moon.

Day Seven.
Got up early and joined Alpha Five in their trail-building project. I was given a machete and charged with hacking away at bushes that had grown over the path. No problem! They finish at 10am because it gets too hot. I decided to go for a swim before lunch, and ended up cutting up both of my feet on rocks. Ouch. I didn't realise how bad it was until I got out of the water. I hobbled back to camp, cracked open my first aid kit, and bandaged myself up.

After lunch, us road tripping guests were invited to take part in a treasure hunt. Unfortunately, the treasure had been buried on a beach the day before, and the X they made to mark the spot had been washed away. Somewhere on a beach on San Lucas, there is a buried bag of porridge.

We went for a wander around the prison. I fell asleep on some large concrete area in the middle of the prison. Turns out it was the pit prisoners got thrown in when they were naughty.

I read a comic written in Scottish accents, had dinner, and went to sleep again on the pier.

Day Eight.
Got up with Alpha Five, but instead of going to work with them, we hung around their camp until our boat came to bring us back to Puntarenas at 9am.

After hamburger and chips for breakfast, Ani insisted we try a Puntarenas speciality ice cream. I have no recollection of ever eating anything so sickly sweet in my life. It was a struggle to finish it, but I refused to be beaten by an ice cream. It was scraped ice, with a load is syrup, powdered condensed milk, a scoop of ice cream on top, and a little tub of condensed milk to pour over it. Bleurgh.

We finally headed back to Fieldbase, dropping Ani in San José end route. I showered and clipped my nails. It was lovely.

It was great spending time on projects and find out what the hell I'm talking about in the corporate blog. It was nice to get to know the Venturers a bit better, even if they did make me feel damn old.

I've thought a lot about how the same attitude that goes into trek could be really well applied to the workplace. On trek, sometimes the path in front of you isn't what the route card says should be in front of you. And you just deal with it, there and then on the spot. Decisions are made quickly, and there's a fantastic positivity in just getting on with it, not spending hours in meetings deliberating over mostly nothing. Adapting what you're doing as you go along isn't a big deal, and there's no drama when things aren't as expected. I love that!

On trek, there's a problem, you deal with it, it's no longer regarded as a problem. In the workplace, there's a problem, you deal with it, it's still regarded as a problem because somebody didn't check their crystal ball, that somebody gets sternly spoken to about the resolved problem in a meeting, and has it put in a report to highlight how useless that somebody is due to their lack of clairvoyance abilities that was never on the job description in the first place. One of those methods of dealing with problems makes a lot more sense than the other.

It's taken a long time to write this blog. There's a lot more pictures, but I'll be putting them all in some kind of online album after expedition. But I'll leave you with this image from the beach at Carate.

Pura Vida!