Fieldbase and the advance team

Yesterday we told you a bit about Costa Rica - but where exactly are we in this bountiful biosphere?

Once your wheels touch the tarmac in San Jose, it’s just two hours by road to the gorgeous mountain town of Turrialba. There are three things you need to know about Turrialba. Firstly, it has some of the best white water rafting on the planet. Secondly, it produces fantastic coffee. Thirdly - and most importantly - it’s the epicenter of Raleigh’s Central America expeditions! A couple of kilometers out of town, on the edge of a beautiful dairy farm, a collection of spick-and-span buildings known as FIELDBASE house the operations team. All the planning and organizing for food, equipment and transport for all the projects across Costa Rica and Nicaragua happens here. It’s a bustling hub of activity and communications – and it’s where everybody comes for their training at the beginning of the expedition, and for each changeover between projects.

Who are the fieldbase team?

Early in January, the first members of the 10B expedition arrived in Costa Rica to set the wheels in motion. This advance party has been beavering away getting everything ready for 10B to kick off on the 1st February. Meet the team below as they brush up their on- and off-road skills…

Ross: Country Programme Manager. Ross is our man of the people – he manages all the incoming Venturers and VMs, including training and development on fieldbase and all our project camps. He hails from Scotland and is an avid Hibs football supporter so head his way for a bit of footie banter.

Laura: Deputy Programme Manager. Lovely Laura runs the day-to-day events and entertainment for the whole expedition. She’s like a bouncy ball of positivity, spreading enthusiasm around the Raleigh camp and drawing up timetables of fun stuff like rafting, salsa and whatnot. She was a Project Manager on the last expedition so this lady really knows her onions.

Sarah: Logistics Manager. AKA The Logger. An organizer extraordinaire, The Logger loves counting things and making really long lists. She manages a team of two, Ashley and Katie, and between them they keep the expedition stocked up with everything it could possibly need. She first went on expedition with Raleigh to Ghana in 1999, then to Namibia in 2004 so she’s a proper expedition pro.

Katie: Logistics coordinator. Shopping in the name of the game for Katie – she scours the land for tasty edible options to keep us hale and hearty. Then she organises all the food and drink drops on projects. She’s lovely and friendly and fair and kind, but remember – she’s ultimately in charge of who gets what to eat. Cross her at your peril.

Ashley: Driver and expedition engineer. Ash pootles about all over Costa Rica and Nicaragua in a big Landrover, distributing all the kit, messages and mail to our project sites. He’s a brilliant engineer so can fix all sorts of things using only an old toothbrush and a bit of dental floss. His motto is “Make it happen!”

Annie: Administrator. This lady loves spreadsheets. She’s fastidiously organized and keeps everyone in order, reminding us about all the things we’ve forgotten, or never even thought about to start with. If there’s something you don’t know, ask Annie. She also runs the fieldbase shop and she’s pretty good at jump-starting jeeps too.

Christine: Finance Manager. Our financial wizard holds the purse strings of the expedition and makes sure we don’t spend too much money on sweets. She loves calculators and is very precise and careful. She came to Costa Rica on expedition at the end of 2009 as a Venturer but loved it so much that she stayed on to be a VM.

Keiner: Host Country Venturer Manager. Keiner is so infamous that we refer to him using a single letter – K. He comes from Costa Rica and manages all the local Venturers. Like the breakfast cereal, Special K is a great way to start the day – he’s full of local knowledge and stories, and you can practice your Spanish on him. He’s done lots of Raleigh stuff before so actually he’s a great person to quiz about pretty much anything.



Safety first at Raleigh - the VM team get stuck into a spot of mechanics...

 

The world's greenest, happiest country?

Great news for anyone heading out to Costa Rica on expedition: if you're reading this under the gloomy grey skies of London or you're sadly snowed in Scotland - or even battling traffic in head-melting Hong Kong - Costa Rica is not only gorgeously green, tropical and warm, but it's officially the happiest place on the earth!

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) was published in July 2009, and measures how much of the world's resources a nation uses against how long and happy a life their citizens enjoy. Costa Ricans - or 'Ticos' as they call themselves - report highest life satisfaction in the world, and also have one of the lowest ecological footprints. Not a bad place to start your 2010, eh?

So what makes them so darn happy? Looking out the window from field base, it's not hard to see why the people here are smiling. Costa Rica is a playground of natural beauty and biodiversity. Straddling the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, this Central American jewel is sandwiched between Nicaragua and Panama, occupying an area slightly smaller than Scotland. The country's backbone is an avenue of lofty peaks complete with thermal pools, waterfalls and volcanic mud pots, plus the spluttering magma of mighty Volcan Arenal. The capital city San Jose perches up in these highlands too. From here, you descend into a world of national parks: swathes of cloudforest packed with quetzal and scarlet macaw; deliciously dense rainforest where jaguar prowl among a hundred different shades of vegetation and tropical flowers bloom. Finally the jungle tumbles down to palm-fringed beaches, where the surf is almost as spectacular as the sunrises and sunsets.

Now switch your minds back to the lands of ‘plenty’ - high consuming nations such as the UK or the USA, by comparison, actually scored badly in the HPI – 74th and 114th respectively. And their HPI scores are dropping as fast as they charge ahead with aggressive economic growth. What Costa Rica seems to be getting right is a sustainable model of living: they consume less and look after their patch of the planet. Life on a Raleigh expedition in Costa Rica is ten-week-taste of this brilliant way of life – we’ll be living simply and sharing our resources carefully as a team, we’ll be engaging in a range of sustainable development projects to improve the ‘happiness’ of the communities and the environment around us, and – by the end of April – we aim to improve the personal happiness of everyone single member of the 10B team. Stay tuned to the blog and we’ll do our best to share a bit of that sunshine with you too.

Next time: Meet the team at Raleigh's Costa Rica fieldbase!

The first blog of the decade

Hello - and a warm Raleigh welcome to the inaugural Expedition 10B blog!

Over the coming thirteen weeks we’ll be providing you with a window into the first Costa Rica and Nicaragua expedition of the decade! This website will be packed with the very latest news and pictures from all our project sites, and will feature our brilliant team of 136 Venturers plus the 40 Volunteer Managers (VMs) they’ll be working alongside. We’ve got our hands full with some incredible projects for 2010: from building schools and piping safe drinking water to isolated communities, to trekking hundreds of kilometers across rainforests and volcanoes to impossibly perfect beaches; from creating a breathtaking viewing platform in a national park to releasing hundreds of tiny turtle hatchlings into the deep blue sea. Will CR&N 10B be the best expedition of the decade? We certainly think so.

Most of our project sites are hidden in pristine, remote places with no internet facilities or public phones, so the expedition journalist and expedition photographer are responsible for bringing friends, family and supporters on this incredible Raleigh journey via our blog. I’m Sarah, your writer and reporter...

And I’ll be working alongside Oliver, our fantastic resident photographer, to provide you with updates as often as possible – daily where we can. But we won’t be doing this alone…

Many of the volunteers will be helping us create these pages: we’ll have guest bloggers, get live news from the heart of the action via daily radio reports; we’ll also be posting plenty of images and video diaries, plus many of our volunteers will be popping in during changeover to record their own stories on these very pages. Please do bookmark the blog and check back regularly. The ‘comments’ section below is a great way to get messages to loved ones – they’ll be processed by the field base team and delivered to the project sites the next time a Raleigh vehicle is dispatched. Don’t forget to include the FULL NAME of the person who you’d like to receive the message. Or just let us know what you think of the blog – we’d love to hear from you!

Next time: find out tomorrow why Costa Rica is the happiest country in the world…