Alpha 3 - the Group To Be! Final Summary

Nineteen days gone and just one beautiful day of sun...luckily our dispositions more than made up for the amount of rain we suffered at Volcan Tenorio!

Over those nineteen days we've walked hundreds of kilometres and lifted many, many bags of sand, cement and gravel - the maths would please any statistician! The team kept together well and helped to motivate each other - and as Amy said, the fact we all lived and slept close together on our jungle camp helped that massively.

Michelle loved her new bed!

The rangers applauded us at the end, impressed by our work ethic (which we must say was completely unrivalled by any other volunteer groups that were working there at the same time as us - a fact we're very proud of!)

The rangers at the National Park with our PMs

They were so impressed that one day they gave us hot showers, let us use their tumble dryer and cooked us a lovely meal and rice pudding for dessert, which was definitely one of the high points of the phase!

So what have we achieved? In the short term, we have aided the building of the staircase to the waterfall and and of the footpath, and set the foundations for the rangers' wall and garden. However in the long term, we will have helped to boost tourism and keep funding coming in for this beautiful area.

We saw some amazing wildlife along the way too. We never saw a tapir (sad face) but got the rare chance to see a troop of white-faced Capuchin monkeys swinging through the trees around our jungle camp. An amazing spectacle!

As the days beckoned nearer to the end, unusually big thunderstorms slowed progress but it gave us the chance to reflect on what we had done and enjoy the team and the friends we had become.

Volcan Tenorio has been physically hard and mentally challenging at times. But we stuck together and buckled down, and we hope to take everything we've learned here into the next phase and into the new group.

 Tom