Costa Rica was absolutely incredible. The biodiversity there is just mind-blowing. We travelled from the hot dry forest to the rainforest and finally to the cloud and mountain forests. Every scene was so unique, yet all of the ecosystems were in the same country.
There were 4 students learning on the course, me included. We were planning to learn about biodiversity, sustainable development, communicate in different languages, help the local communities and build a turtle nursery.
We started by going up into the rainforest and seeing all the different plants and animals that lived there. We began our course there to see the different rural/sustainable tourism and see how each one affected the natural ecosystem around them. It was a really good beginning to the course as I learnt a huge amount about the sustainable projects going on in Costa Rica.
After many wet days and a thorough drenching on horse back, we headed down to the dry hot coast where we stayed at the Cirenas (the course we were on) campus. It was on the Nicoya peninsula and it was stunning. You could see the waves crashing on the long beach from the porch and at high tide the sea would climb so high that it felt like you where on an island. At the campus we learnt about the different systems used to make someone more sustainable and we looked at different projects around Costa Rica to see how sustainable each one was.
A small bit of sad news, as we were walking on the beach to collect garbage I found a dead baby bull shark about 1.5 feet long and basically its whole body gone. At first I thought it was a natural death till I saw the deadly longline hook in its mouth. It made me angry that this beautiful shark would never make it to adulthood all because it was accidentally caught on a longline and I assume either eaten by a bigger animal or drifted till exhaustion.
Overall the experience at the Cirenas campus was relaxing, knowledgable and peaceful because I really felt like I was in nature.
After hiking and exploring the coast we travelled further up along the Nicoya peninsula to help build a turtle nursery and do patrols for nesting sea turtles.
We went to Playa San Miguel. It was a beautiful beach, which we saw in both sunlight (building the nursery) and in the moonlight (on turtle patrols). We didn't see any turtles on the patrols but we had a great time bonding and learning about turtles on the late night strolls. We made a great start on the nursery and the PRETOMA (A turtle and shark conservation organization) volunteers were grateful for our help, as it was a tough and tiring job.
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