Week 4 continued!

January 20th, 2009 by Zoe Methven

So eventually i get myself to an internet cafe with some time to write this up! Just 2 weeks late!!!

back to week 4…

Playa Buena Vista, turtle project number 2.

20 people, no electricity, dinner by candlelight and sleeping on the balcong outdoors and we are loving it! There are no shops to spend money so this is the cheapest week ever!!!! Our days are very much up at 6am (sunrise), breakfast, and then jobs for 2 hours, these are; exhuming nests, cleaning garbage, sanding the house then glue-ing it to prevent termites!! (strange method but we did it 5 times so let’s hope it works!!!)  weeding the garden – a favourite, building a fence, changing the sand of old nests – which was digging a huge whole to remove all contaminated sand and replacing with wet sand from the beach – very heavy work, digging a drain through cow pats, oh and releasing turtles!!! then it was free time until lunch then free time until afternoon jobs which were pretty much the same as the morning except you also got to open the unhatched turtle eggs from the morning exhumations… this means, removing the maggots, popping the eggs, and determining what stage of growth the turtle died at! lovely job, smelt REALLY good! oh such fun! after the afternoon jobs it was free time again, dinner and often bed around 8pm! In addition to this you also had your shift which was a 2 hour shift during the night where you had to monitor the nests for newly hatched turtles and release them into the sea… into the seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa… or a patrol where you check the beach for turtles laying their eggs ( if you find some you then move to the hatchery).

So this week had more work than Playa Matapalo but it was alot of fun. We had a great group of people (once some of the noisy americans left). Our group all got along really well. Cab-t think of any funnies as it was too long ago!!!!! Sorryyy… Julia and I got to release lots of baby turtles and it was very very cute.

2 of the camp rules were no alcohol and no leaving the camp… for this week that was not a problem although when Sunday came (our day off) we thoroughly enjoyed our glass of wine. Once the wine was in our system… week 5 was more challenging!!! :)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 10:09 am and is filed under Costa Rica.

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