Echo 3: An unforgettable phase in the jungle

Rosalyn Brown fills us in on Echo 3's time in La Cangreja National Park:

"Echo Three spent Phase 2 in the park.Working ‘til midday, chilling out ‘til dark".

The opening lines of our skit song (sung sweetly to the tune of Atomic Kitten’s Whole Again) do a pretty good job of summing up our time in the beautiful La Cangreja National Park. After waking up in our basher beds to beautiful sunrises, we spent our mornings helping the lovely rangers Don Bolivar, Guido and co around the park – our jobs were varied, ranging from painting corrugated iron roofs, planting trees and widening the tourist trails, to washing and then carrying pipes to install along the Water Trail (‘Sendero Agua’), improving the water supply to the ranger station.

Spending time with the rangers was great fun and although though there were sometimes communication difficulties, we all learned lots of environmental-specific Spanish vocab (‘Reticula’ = root; ‘Rama’ = tree and ‘Resbaladizo’ = slippery - generally a reference to the very muddy paths we spent our mornings slipping and sliding along).

The rest of our days consisted of ‘chilling out’ - we had Spanish and English lessons aplenty, our entire Echo 3 group became pros at eight card blackjack and ‘Deal’ (a highly addictive Spanish card game based on Monopoly), we furnished our camp with home improvements (including Azam’s coffee table, Sarah’s spice rack and a magnificent albeit slightly lopsided deckchair built by Robbie!) and produced a wide range of culinary delights – as well as our super Tico cooking duo ‘Joni and Toni’, Amy and Tori whipped up a pretty fantastic papaya cake!

One afternoon, our lovely PMs Matt and Gitti organized an epic scavenger hunt which had us all racing red-faced around the entire park taking photographs of abandoned long drops and various people hugging trees! 

Another particularly memorable day was our ‘four hour round-trip’ up to the summit of nearby Cerro Cangreja  which evolved into an 11 hour trek through the pouring rain. Needless to say we returned to jungle camp soaked through, exhausted and proceeded to eat our body weight in noodles and rice pudding!

I am sure that we will all look back on our time at La Cangreja with extremely fond memories. It is certainly not very often that you can list among your weekly activities ‘I climbed a waterfall and splashed around in some natural jacuzzis’ or ‘I saw five scarlet macaws, a snake and two toucans’! For me at least, it was an unforgettable three weeks living in a beautiful jungle with such an enthusiastic, diverse and genuinely lovely group of people that I am proud to have been part of a team with. Go Echo Three!