Rustic Pathways Round 2

Just over a week in Costa Rica and it feels like so much longer! I'm back here to do Rustic Pathways, round 2, another three months of leading kids around on adventure, community service, language, and cultural activities.

I had a glorious reunion with Lauren in the airport when she came to pick me up. It was everything I imagined it to be, complete with a Love Actually embrace, sign made out on napkins with a pen, and lots of jumping up and down and picture taking. Guilherme, our Brazilian friend who we worked with at Rustic last year, was there too, and it seemed like everything just fell back into summer 2008's place. I spent the weekend with Gui at Kelly (another guide from last year and a girl I went to AU with) and Lauren's apartment and then we began a week of staff training in la Fortuna. This year instead of 60 guides, we were cut in half, making the pool of cool people a bit smaller with 35. Six of us were back from last year, designated as "senior guides" to help out the new guides, but mostly we just recounted stories of last year's problem children, medical episodes, and staff gossip. The best stories included the girl who got attacked by a cow, the girl who claimed her mysterious 22 year old boyfriend that her parents weren't aware of got into a car accident and therefore had to rush home ASAP, and finally the guide who kept calling the program "Kim"was on hoping to whisper sweet nothings in her ear. After we rapped up staff training, me and 2 other guides went with our manager Alex to check out the Osa Peninsula, where the program Heart of the Jungle runs. We had to meet with a bunch of operators (hotels, people who arranged community service, adventure activity companies, etc) while we were down there. We went around the geography that the 2 week trip covers in just 2 days. Today we drove 8+ hours from down at the tip near Playa Carate (zoom in, red dot at bottom of map). It's a gorgeous place right on the beach near the Corcovado National Park, which holds 2.5% of the world's biodiversity. It's so remote we had to have a horse take our bags and we walked along the beach for half an hour. I did this program last year, so it was nice revisiting these places. We met with most of the people who we'll be in contact with down there, but some of the community service projects are still not totally together. We met with the principal at one school today and she didn't even know when we were coming or what we were doing (apparently it had been arranged through someone else). But that's just how things work down here, everything at the last minute. Well the kids get here tomorrow night and the madness starts Wednesday so these blogs will be sporadic from here on out, sorry!