Gossip

Fashion

Health

Destiny

Relationships

Travel

Career

Beauty

Green Issues

Culture

Family

Lifestyle

New Mother

More on Travel
Ciao Bambino	Barcelona
Chichester UK breaks	Costa Rica
Goa	Ski&Spa in Bulgaria

Costa Rica

By Juliet England

More than a year ago, Reading resident Juliet England wrote in the Evening Post about her Raleigh International selection weekend. Against all possible odds, she ended up being offered a place as a Press Officer on a 3-month expedition taking more than 100 young people to Costa Rica & Nicaragua. Here she tells the tale of her adventures so far . .. .

At Holborn Tube Station, the Evening Standard seller had a T-shirt saying ‘Same S**t, different day,’ and I couldn’t help noting with glee a poster advertising the following week’s Tube strike. It was the perfect day to leave for Central America.

After somehow bringing myself to leave Reading behind, I turned up at Heathrow at 5.30am one early autumn Sunday morning, along with most of the 40-odd team who would be colleagues, house-mates, friends and confidants over the next three months.

What no one had told me was that we changed planes in Miami – so it was only several minutes after landing there that it dawned on me that we weren’t actually in Costa Rica. This was repeated hours later, when we landed in Panama City for an unscheduled overnight stop, and I slept through the announcement, before finding myself in the unique situation of being mistaken twice in the same day about which country I was in.

When we eventually did get to San Jose, we were taken straight to Raleigh’s field base near the small town of Turrialba, some 70 km to the east of the capital. Home for the next 12 weeks was to be a cattle farm in a lush sugar cane swept valley, near an agricultural tropical research centre.

Within two days, we were being sent off on a jungle survival exercise. This started off as a bit of a lark, trekking through beautiful scenery and stopping to chat to coffee farmers.

We arrived at the camp site just as evening was beginning to fall, and the rain was settling in for the night. It wasn’t long before I started to smell like a Glastonbury beer tent full of damp dogs. I slithered around in the mud, asked repeatedly if there was anything I could do, and generally got in the way. I think it is not unreasonable to say that I am not really cut out for this kind of caper, and, on the balance of probabilities, Juliet England: Extreme Survival is unlikely to set next spring’s TV schedules ablaze.

Other memorable highlights included rowdy staff meetings and a staff party in which a massive water fight formed a central part of the evening’s proceedings, and in which I was an innocent victim.

Just as I thought that I had signed up for more of a holiday than volunteer work the expedition began properly, and I found myself en route to the airport to meet the young Venturers, which meant an overnight stay in San Jose. It is crucial to remember, when you wake up at 5am on a cold hard gym floor, after five hours’ sleep, that this is the worst you are going to feel all day.

Before long, everyone was ready to deploy to their project sites.

I was sent off with Lyndon the Driver, a LandRover and a trailer on an 11-day odyssey to Nicaragua.

Lyndon has trained with the RAF, and seen active service in Bosnia. Now he faced his greatest challenge – coping with a driver’s mate who could not light a camping stove or even drink a cup of tea without taking several hours or sparking a major incident. Then there was my knowledge of map-reading, which, lamentably, does not extend beyond a strong conviction that holding the wretched thing the right way up is vital.

Lyndon’s cigarette and Nurofen intake soared as we tried to negotiate the navigational hell that is Mad Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, which is utterly devoid of all the usual clues like road signs and street names.

At a Raleigh project near the old colonial capital of Granada, we played a Spanish version of What’s the time Mr Wolf? with local children, and I had a fascinating chat with a young volunteer from the Bri Bri indigenous tribe, who told me he could tell the time by looking at the moon. It was definitely 7pm he said. It was a heartbreaking moment when he insisted on seeing my watch, revealing the painful truth that it was in fact twenty past nine.

In Achuapa, after driving through the most rugged and beautiful scenery, we took the wrong track out of the village (I blame the map), ploughed through a river and hit a quagmire at 6.30pm. We were to remain stranded in this stretch of mud for 14 hours. Lyndon tried to pull us out (well, no point in both of us getting dirty …..) and returned to the LandRover absolutely plastered from head to foot in the black stuff. At least I was good enough to offer him a Wet Wipe.

A gaggle of local people popped up out of nowhere and called to us from the far bank of the quagmire at about midnight. “Don’t lose hope, all will be well,” they cried, before, er, shoving off to their beds and leaving us to try and get a few hours’ sleep on the LandRover roof.

The farmer was back at 5am the next morning, rather rudely I thought as I was hoping for a lie-in.

More on Travel
Ciao Bambino	Reykjavik
Chichester UK breaks	Costa Rica
Goa	Ski&Spa in Bulgaria

Within a couple of hours, we were weeping with relief as a local tractor hauled us out of the slime. We soon found the project site where we were supposed to have pitched up the previous night, and received a hero’s welcome.

Just as we thought we were on the home strait, we had a radio message to say that a school building project would have to be changed. This was to mean another four days on the road, as we helped move the group and all its equipment from the existing site to another part of the country, near the town of Buenos Aires. Here the Raleigh group will be laying 11 km worth of pipes for an aqueduct that will give local people a safe supply of drinking water.

Finally, having completed 2,500 kilometres, we were allowed back to the civilised environs of field base, whose calm was shattered when well over 100 young Venturers returned for a weekend to enjoy the sense of well-being that only a proper shower can afford, and generally sort themselves out before heading off to their new projects and the second part of the expedition.

	Film nuts4chic has incredible Culture pages including this exclusive interview with Jennifer Lopez. Check it out!
	Love Neely Steinberg is nuts4chic Relationship Editor. She finds out How To Fall In Love With The Right Man.
	Fashion nuts4chic fashion. Blue is the new black and we are all ready to face the Spring Blues!
	Gossip Jennifer Pinner is hot on the trail of our Celebrities. Gossip is the word. nuts4chic has it all!
	Health Are you nuts4food? Bread making is not rocket science. nuts4chic goes baking.

1 of 1