Conservation?... no, construction

Once we arrived at the lodge we quickly found out that in addition to our conservation work, we would have the chance to work at a summer camp for the local primary school children being run by Donald and his wife Pip.

The next day was ment to be our first day working at the camp however, due to a very unfortunate and quite shocking incident in the local community, the camp was cancelled. This gave us a free afternoon, we asked if we could get started on some work around the lodge however we were told to just enjoy the reserve and take a walk through the trails and the hanging bridges.

Ironically the next day was to be manual labour from start to finish. As I mentioned earlier on in the blog a group of seventy christian missionaries were arriving from the USA to spread the word of God. The lodge had overstretched itself a little and didn't have enough rooms, as such we were called in to help complete some new rooms which were in the process of being constructed. We had 1 day to finish four rooms to a standard they could be lived in the next day... and there was alot to do. But this is Costa Rica, and we run on tico time so no-one seemed overly concerned.

The before shot


Our first job was a little landscaping next to the new lodges. This involved taking earth from a near by embankment and moving it to the area adjacent to the new rooms.

Professional landscape gardeners


Muscle vest

The embankment

Have a break, have a kitkat

After a couple of hours it was decided we were fighting a losing battle with the landscaping, especially as time was ticking on and the rooms were still nowhere near ready. As such we turned our attentions inside the rooms. Everything needed cleaning out thoroughly prior to the furniture etc being constructed. The Costa Ricans had an interesting approach to this, just hose everything down... including plug sockets and light switches.

Professional decorators

Hose it down and sweep it out of the door

The work force

We managed to get everything finished with literally no time to spare and the light fading. We did point out amongst ourselves that we could quite easily have gotten started on alot of the work the day before when we had our free afternoon... but again this is tico time.