¡Pura Vida!

Back from a day on the Rio Pacuara with slightly pink legs and dodgy sandal tan lines, feeling thoroughly refreshed from a few hours winding our way through lush green jungle and navigating some of the most stunning white water in the world. Toucans, beautiful blue morpho butterflies and spotting a sloth made a good day off even better, and we're now looking forward to topping it off with an evening of pizza and an early night (much needed after yesterday's Burns' Night celebrations and Ceilidh, and a very active salsa lesson the night before that).

Getting ready to strip the willow

Taking a break form salsa dancing to laugh at everyone else

Don't get the wrong idea. Today's watery activities were a welcome break from the last 2 and a half weeks of work preparing  for the arrival of 134 young Raleigh Venturers in 3 days time. That's a lot of people. And a lot of work to get ready. Part of my role here as Logistics Manager is to make sure they have enough food for their 10 weeks of expeditioning, all the right kit and equipment to complete the community and environmental work they'll do, make the jungle camps they'll sleep in and trek the hundreds of kilometres they'll be walking. Since arriving in Costa Rica on the 7th January it has been non-stop. The first week was spent with the rest of the advance field base team, 15 of us in all, getting to grips with our various jobs before the even busier 2 week Volunteer Manager staff induction started. For me this involved some serious testing of my Spanish skills, chatting to suppliers and ordering an obscenely large amount of food, as well as making sure our field base (located at CATIE, a large agricultural research institution in Turrialba) was ready not only for the venturers but also for the arrival of our 24 Project Managers who joined us last week to complete our staff team. Happily we did manage to get enough done in our first week to earn some time off to visit one of the local active volcanoes, Volcan Irazu.

The advance Field Base team (including Liz our photographer, behind the camera!)

Marquee construction begins

With over 100 Venturers we needed to create a lot of sleeping space - this was only the first marquee...

Week 1 of induction included 2 nights out camping in the jungle, brushing up on navigation skills, cooking on Trangias, practising HF radio comms, and learning to put up a hammock or make a basha bed in preparation for sleeping in close proximity to a lot of insects. Over the last few days PMs have been busy planning projects, visiting their project sites in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, completing risk assessments and casevac plans, and mentally preparing for what the next 3 months will hold, while the excitement is building in anticipation of the Venturers' arrival.

A suitably risky  bridge for some risk assessment training

Sarah and Antonio discovering the joy of jungle living

Getting some practice at river crossing techniques

Discussing the finer details of health and safety on a work site

As well as partaking in induction activities, I am also managing deliveries of large quantities of food and supplies (quantities like 400 portions of refried beans, 1250 packets of nuts and raisins, 400 toilet roles, 2500 granola bars...), visiting a hardware store to buy spades, shovels and jerry cans (the genuine conversations I've had about when to call a spade a spade or a shovel a shovel have gone into quite some depth), mending tents, counting stock, fixing toilets, and making good friends with our handyman and all round legend Don Martin, who helps me out with fixing leaking taps, buying new beds for the staff accommodation, tells me where I can get discounted tools and helps me with my Spanish by speaking at a pace I can keep up with. So it is busy, but fun. After my experiences with Raleigh in India, it is great to be back but this time seeing the workings of expedition from a very different angle. I think I'll be quite envious of all the PMs taking their groups out on amazing projects, living in the Costa Rican jungle or with families in Nicaragua, but at the same time I am excited to settle into life at field base, supporting all the project teams, chatting to groups on their daily sit-reps and best of all visiting them all on our expedition road trips.

For a more in-depth view of life on expedition 13A, the official blog, maintained by our comms officer Gabby, is here: www.raleighcostarica.blogspot.com

Tanzania to Kenya (experiencing some lion and cheetahing while zebra-crossing the border)

My final week in Africa did not disappoint. The wildlife of the Serengeti was on top form and gave us some extraordinarily lucky views of what it had to offer (pictures supposedly say a thousand words so I’m not going to write much). Descending into the Ngorongoro Crater was fascinating, and spotting some black rhinos, albeit in the distance, just topped off a superb few days of wildlife sightings before the final leg of driving up to Nairobi to fly home. Despite having our truck impounded for a couple of hours at the Tanzania-Kenya border, we made it to Nairobi in time for onward travel plans (after some tense negotiations to avoid paying an outrageous bribe) and I’m now writing from a cold and wet UK, where I arrived in the early hours of Christmas Eve.

After a busy few days catching up with friends and family, the next and final stage of my adventures is beginning on 7^th January when I am returning to work for Raleigh International, only this time in Central America. My role will be based at the Raleigh field base in Turrialba in Costa Rica, where I will be working as the Logistics Manager for three months, ensuring around 11 remote expedition teams across Costa Rica and Nicaragua are supplied with all the food and equipment they need for project work and trekking. It’s going to be a busy few months with so many teams on expedition, and should be a good opportunity to improve my Spanish too. I’m also hoping that by holding the budget for chocolate biscuit supplies people will have to be extra nice to me.

¡Hasta la próxima vez, desde Costa Rica!