Canadian Nomad

Rainsong is a wildlife sanctuary on the North Pacific coast of Costa Rica in a small town in Cabuya. They take in injured and abandoned wildlife with the hope of releasing them back into the wild. Volunteers spend many hours each day caring for the wildlife in the rescue center and help to build more animal habitats for the hospital and breeding areas. I really wanted to work with animals so I decided to come here to help out.

The accommodation is very basic and rustic. There is at the moment two beds with a thin mattress, various other mattresses on the floor and a hammock. The walls are simple to say the least, they go up about a quarter of the way then the rest is covered by sheets of tarp. The stairs leading up to the room are varied in sized and quite difficult to go up and down. The gate at the bottom is made for those who are quite slender and it wouldn’t surprise me if some people may have to go through sideways just to fit through. As of right now the gate is being “locked” by a piece of string to keep the goats, pizotes, and Señor Piggy out.

Now for the kitchen, it has a gas stove with three burners, and you must pay extra for any gas you use. The fridge leaks water all over the floor and the interior. That being said, you want to keep your food outside in the other fridge that is not being used as a fridge but as a dry cupboard. Other than that the kitchen is very basic, there is no oven, though there is not much you need an oven for.

The toilet is located a bit of a walk away from the kitchen and is awfully dark at night. I personally have seen worse toilets but the other people staying here are quite horrified by the likes of it. It’s outhouse-ish but with a flushing toilet. The door is merely a sheet draped in front. The toilet is also home to many strange and interesting spiders. Be warned.

The shower is quite nice in my eyes. It’s a bit further up than the toilet and is three walls with a shower head in the middle. There is no roof and you stand on a small plank of wood under the shower head. It’s surrounded by quite a bit of trees and bushes. There has been a few mornings where I’ll be showering, then all of a sudden leaves will start falling on me and I look up and there is a group of white faced monkeys playing in the tree right above me.

Tags: Rainsong

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 at 9:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.