9 & 10 August

First of all Happy Birthday to our team leader, Louise. Together with the two local workers at the reserve and two of the volunteers she helped clear weeds around the planted trees on the Chirripo trail today. A tiring, blister giving job but it was a lot of fun. After all the weeds had been cut they put cardboard around the trees so there won’t be any new weeds growing directly around the trees. In the evening we had a nice night filled with games with everyone at basecamp.
The next day the rest of the team came back down from Skutch. They almost had to come back down earlier because of a lack of water. The camp is high up the mountain so there is no river close by to get water from, so we always have to rely on catching water from the rainfall. However, the past few days it hadn’t rained at all, so when the team got to the camp they only had a small 4 liters of water which they had to use both for drinking and cooking. Luckily on the second day they had plenty of rain to fill a bucket again, but this was after living off biscuits for a night because of the lack of water to cook with. Things don’t always go as planned in the jungle! But we try our best to make the most out of every situation.
In the evening we all went out for dinner at hotel Uran for Louise’s birthday. That was great fun again. On the way back we spotted two separate tarantulas hiding in their burrow. We tried to lure them out with a piece of grass. The first one we couldn’t fool, but the second one did come out. He surprised all of us with the big size that none of us expected. The body was a good 6-7cm long!

Tarantula