Costa Rica 2025

Now that we’re about a third of the way through the program, we’ve stayed at around 7 spots total with a mix of accommodations and camping. So far I’ve woken to amazing views of the beach, squirrel monkeys in the trees, and the sounds of the jungle waking up. I’ve also fallen asleep to some strange sounds; howler monkeys, torrential  rains, and mixture of frog and sacada hum. What an amazing experience this has been🕺❤️

So sorry that I haven’t been updating as we go. This program has been hitting heavy with the academic course work - field journal entries, readings, discussions, and quizzes. It’s been pretty non stop for these first 11 days and finally getting some down time to post on here. And I finally have service! Our first couple of locations have been lodgings where we stayed with the indigenous Terraba people and learned about   their involvement in the opposition of the developing diqís dam and their relationship with and regeneration of the forest. Thanks to our local guide and very knowledge ecologist, Allan, he introduced us to the agroforestry practices that were taking place due to the Terraba community. Their philosophy was to cultivate products to feed all things, not just humans.   

We outta here! I was actually super nervous heading to the airport, eek! The beginnings of a grand adventure!! I’m excited to get started after an almost 16 hr travel day to our first camp site, woohoo! Not only am I looking forward to all the cool academic things we’ll be getting into but hoping to leave with some cool stories as well :)  Hopefully this is the first of many adventures.  Also, going to break in my new adventure hat on this trip, we’ll see how it holds up and how white it stays 

 I have been waiting to a gear haul ever since the fist package came in :) What a great excuse to go shopping?! It was fun laying everything out, but also very helpful when trying to pack most efficiently and tracking what I’ve brought. This is actually a crazy amount of gear but all are unfortunately, super necessary when trying to follow the packing guide to a T. I stepped on the scale with all of this stuff and it came out to ~68lbs!! I’m going to have a super time lugging all this around the jungle for 6 weeks. Yay! Shout out the thrift/facebook market place for providing me with some unique things. I’m hoping that this can also serve as a guide for those who come after me in similar positions. I have only really been camping once so all of this gear is new to me so I hope I might save some people hours of research :)  Even though these were big purchases, I’m looking forward to using these on future backpacking adventures. Could this be the beginning of my camping era?? A...

     For my trip, I purchased the  Olympus Stylus Zoom 140 Deluxe 35mm Point & Shoot. It's a fairly simple camera but can take quality photos and zoom in pretty far. This camera is all weather which means I can use it in the rain, yay!, because there's going to be tons of that where I'm going. I'm hoping to take some vibrate photos of the jungle and its animals when/if my phone becomes unavailable. One cool feature that I really like is that it automatically puts the date in the corner of all my photos which will be really cool to come back to after some years. Film cameras are always a fun surprise to see how each photo comes out after getting it developed.   Here's the link to a small video of the camera -  camera clip