Once again this blog comes to you from a bus, my second one of the day and it’s only 9.20! We are heading back up to the Nicaraguan border after a whirlwind two weeks in Costa Rica but this post will take us back to when we arrived. 

As the month went from November to December we went from Nicaragua to Costa Rica, more specifically to the town of Santa Elena, famous for cloud forests and cheese. Interesting combination, I know. Before we got there we had a border crossing which is obviously our favourite part of travelling, especially when we get conned into spending $10 on an immigration form and then ripped off when we had $20 of change stolen from us. Good times.

Costa Rica is a richer and therefore more expensive country than either Nicaragua or Honduras. It has a much stabler and stronger economy resulting in higher employment and higher living standards. Ticos (the Costa Rican people) are some of the happiest people in the world to the extent that their army was abolished in 1948. You can’t go anywhere without hearing the phrase ‘pura vida‘ (literally pure life). It’s used as hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome and in a hundred other ways and is the best way to summarise and understand the tico view of life. 

As Costa Rica is expensive and we are extreme cheapskates we were looking for as many free activities in the area as possible especially if we were going to spend $20 on entrance to the Monteverde cloud forest. This lead to what we ended up doing on our first afternoon. 

A bit of cultural trivia for you here. Before I arrived in Honduras I was a hitchhiking virgin. However in Honduras and Central America hitchhiking is much more common and possibly even safer than it is in the UK. To be fair it’s much harder to be kidnapped when you’re in the open bed of a truck, all you need to do is jump out at a red light. Anyway, back on topic, hitchhiking is something we’ve come to do more and more in effort to save money wherever we can. 

On this particular afternoon we decided we wanted to go to Monteverde’s famous cheese factory, set up by the Quakers that first founded the settlement. According to our bible (Lonely Planet’s Guide to Central America on a Shoestring) it was a bit of a walk away from where we were staying so why not hitchhike? The only problem was that with six of us and the fact that the trucks from Nicaragua and Honduras had been swapped for bulky 4x4s most people are usually put off straight away. So we decided to make it more interesting – two teams and a race to see who got there first. Winner gets eternal bragging rights. 

My team was Amy, Lucy and me and we decided to keep walking so that even if it took ages to get picked up at least we were making progress. What actually happened though is that after a while this car passed us with a speccy face and a head of curly hair peering out the back. Jesse, Tom and Calum had passed us. We got picked up a minute later though and not two hundred metres up the road we saw them where they’d been unceremoniously dumped on the pavement. 

We made it the whole way to the cheese factory in our ride and had time for a celebratory selfie, to peruse the cheeses on offer and pick out ice cream as a prize. The others eventually made it with their new friend Jeff in tow. Jeff had followed them from where their second ride picked them up, running alongside the car and barking away. 

We got another ride back, all of us together this time and got talking to the American lady whose car it was. She was even nice enough to show us something free we could do the next day on the way back. That evening we were joined by Lucy’s friend Mac who was going to spend about 10 days slumming it in Costa Rica with us. 

It’s hard to top a hitchhiking race to a cheese factory but we tried the next day with a trip to the Reserva Biológica Bosque Nuboso de Monteverde. We wanted to see some animals but were told it was unlikely because of the time of day. We must be the next David Attenboroughs though because we saw a monkey badger thing! Yeah I don’t know what it is either… If anyone does please let me know! 

In the afternoon we set off to find the free sight we’d been told about yesterday – the ficus tree. There were actually several within ten metres or so of each other and they were like something out of a fairytale. It reminded me of reading the Faraway Tree, this massive spiral leading the way into what could be another world. In reality it just got tight, damp and dark at the top but I can still pretend. 

That pretty much concluded our stay in Monteverde. We left the next morning for Montezuma, a beach town on the Peninsula de Nicoya on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. Santa Elena was a charming town that reminded us a lot of a European ski resort and at the end of our short but sweet stay we were enamoured with it. 

I’m back! Did you miss me? It’s been a while since I’ve given any updates on my progress, I know, but I’ve been away having incredible adventures in Costa Rica! For those of you that are interested I’ll tell you a bit about my four amazing weeks there. If you’re just here to see my fundraising news, skip to the end to find out what’s going on.

During my summer holidays I spent a month in Costa Rica, a Central American country separated from Honduras by Nicaragua, with a volunteering organisation called GVI. The first week was cultural immersion with seven other teenagers from all around the world – we had Americans, Canadians, more Brits and even a Swiss boy. Cultural immersion meant four hours of Spanish lessons a day, salsa class and cooking class and staying with a host family for a week.

This was one of my favourite parts of my whole trip. Staying with the host family improved my Spanish more than the lessons did because my family didn’t speak much English so it was up to me to make conversation and pass along information in Spanish. My tico family (tico is a term Costa Ricans use to refer to themselves) were absolutely amazing and I loved spending a whole week as part of their family, with an American girl from my group and two other American students they had staying with them. It was a very busy house!

After spending a week in Quepos with our host families, we moved to a hostel in the neighbouring hillside town of Manuel Antonio where we were joined by another eight volunteers. The next two weeks were spent doing construction work at a school in a community called Roncador. We had two more groups of volunteers join during this time with some of the cultural immersion group leaving after a week. It was hard work under a hot sun but we got through a massive amount of work, more than anyone expected. We dug drains to stop the playground flooding, cleared, levelled and landscaped an area behind the kindergarten classroom for a new playground for the kindergarten kids, wirebrushed and painted tin panels for a new roof for the GVI English classroom, filled in the holes in the wall with cement and gave the lunch hall, kindergarten classroom, outside wall and English classroom all a fresh coat of paint!

One day we got to have a sports day with the kids, and while we’d seen them in their lessons and running around during their breaks this was the first time we got to interact with them. They practised their English on us and we practised our Spanish on them, and we got to really meet the people that we were doing all this work for. It reminded us all why we were there, where all our sweat and effort was actually going.

The day we left the project for the last time after two weeks there was a sad one and I think part of us wished we could stay for another week and do more. I am so proud of what we achieved throughout those two weeks and I know that the difference we have made will have a very real impact on the kids. It gives them a safer, cleaner, nicer learning environment to learn in and be proud of.

After two weeks of hard work we moved into our adventure week! We started with a trip to the Manuel Antonio National Park where we saw everything from monkeys and baby boa constrictors to spiders, lizards and crabs climbing trees and even a sloth! The next day we took to the beach where I learnt that surfing is just as hard as it looks (which is hard!) but about a hundred times more fun!

On the Monday of our last week we left the Quepos-Manuel Antonio area which had been my home for the last three weeks and drove across to the other side of Costa Rica to Turrialba. For our next adventure we went ziplining and abseiling in the rainforest before embarking on a rafting trip down the Rio Pacuare, one of the best rivers in the world for rafting. We spent two days navigating down class III and IV rapids and on the day in between we hiked to an indigenous village.

When it was time to leave Costa Rica, I was heartbroken. It is such a beautiful country, from the stunning landscape to the warm, welcoming people. Costa Rica will always be very special to me, as my first proper experience of travelling, as will the global friendships that I formed there. For now all I will say is pura vida Costa Rica, and you never know, I might make it down to see you while I’m in Honduras!

Now I am back in Scotland and back at school and it’s time to start fundraising again! This week I’m running a ‘Guess the Number of Sweets on the Jar’ at school and on Sunday morning I’m hosting a coffee morning at my house to share my stories and photos from Costa Rica.

Costa Rica felt like a mini version of what it will be like in Honduras and it has made the excitement real and given me something solid to look forward to. I can’t wait to get further into my fundraising and closer to my year on Honduras!