My Gap Year

Both Soph and I have really enjoyed our first week in the rainforest. It is a complete change from Nepal in many ways. The tropical weather is something that I think both Soph and I will adjust to with no problem, though during the middle of the day it can almost get a bit too hot!!The conservation work has been really great to, we get to do variety of things from doing some peaceful bird watching to feeding and building cages for the animals that at our around the lodges we live in and on the farm that Projects Abroad support! The work can be quite physical, especially when we have to work with the machettes, I had to go and cut down a load of trees in order to build some new ledges for the birds to perch on - that was a pretty tiring day!The rainforest is a really nice place to be though, it is really peaceful and very calming, though the mosquitos are out in force most of the time and no matter how much DET you put on yourself they still seem to bite you, so both of us have a nice collection of bites dotted around our bodies!!

On Friday all the volunteers we´re given a day off from the conservation work, and we all got taken down river by Stuart, who is the man in charge, to a large lake called Lake Valencia. It was a really nice day out, and was really nice to have a break from the work. We all ended up going in the lake and attempted to do a kind of water skiing off the back of the boat, the water ski was infact and ore from a rowing boat and it was literally attached to some rope that was being held by someone in the boat - it was new take on water skiing and was really good fun! We´d been given sandwiches by our chef at the lodge, so had a bit of a picnic and then continued to swim for a little bit more, then we headed back to the lodge!

The lodge that we stay in was actually built by past volunteers when the project first started up, they managed to do a pretty impressive job, though the rooms aren´t exactly luxurious they are perfectly fine, we have a bunk bed and some shelves and that is really all we need!! The food is pretty impressive aswell, we get meat everyday of the week depsite the fact that they have no way of re-fridgerating things, don´t really want to know how they keep the meat we just accept it and eat it! We also get given alot of rice, but we are both now used to it after Nepal!!

Overall both of us are really enjoying our time in the rainforest and we´ve had a great first week!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.