For the past 4 days Carpe has been staying at an awesome hostel called Flashpackers. Its located dead in the middle of a surf town, with a 10 minute walk into town on one side, a 10 minute walk to the beach on the other side, and a 5 minute walk to the National Park. And to top it off it has a free shuttle that drives us to each… Read More
Hola de Playa Gigante!
The group is staying as busy as ever here in Nicaragua. We finished up Student Directed Travel with nights in Masaya and San Juan del Sur, and continued on to Playa Gigante which is where we happily write to you from!
Masaya greeted us with a hostel all to ourselves, complete with our own puppy for the night as well, some disappointing (although SAFE, as the… Read More
What’s up Family and Friends,
We are here enjoying our down time here in the beach town of Noosa for a couple of days before we head out to the Outback to survive and do some wild life preservation for two weeks. Our family is still incomplete with the loss of our two brothers but we are still living it up here taking surf lessons, paddle boarding, swelling up at… Read More
Hello family and friends back home!
These past four days have been spent in a small village called Kanani. We were split up into groups of two and were sent separate ways to stay with different families. Although a few of us were sick, we all tried as best as we could to help out around the house. We helped cook the meals, clean the dishes, and carried a number… Read More
Hey everyone!
As you may already know, today marks our 8th day in Australia. Already the Hongi family has experienced everything from mediation with Buddhist nuns to visiting the Australia Zoo on Steve Irwin Day. Despite the loss of two beloved group members, we have still managed to carry on (albeit heavyheartedly at times) and enjoy the amazing opportunities we’ve been granted. On a more personal note, this week has… Read More
Namaste North America! Matt from Boston here!
After an amazing week in Calcutta, we took a domestic flight back to Delhi and then a train to Rishikesh. We spent 7 days just outside of the city at the Phool Chatti Ashram, which is a silent yoga and meditation retreat. While having to wake up every day at 5:30am, the rigid schedule, and the speaking limits were all challenging aspects of… Read More
NAMASTE Y’ALL.
Shanti’s experience in Amritsar has been pretty interesting to say the least. Amritsar is known as the spiritual center for the Sikhs and home of the Golden Temple, Harmandir Sahib. The temple is MAGNIFICENT. If you’d like to see images of the holy temple, feel free to Google: “Harmandir Sahib”. I guarantee the pictures hardly do it justice, you must come see it for yourself. I promise you,… Read More
Howdy y’all! Our apologies for the late post, we’ve been rather internet-less for quite awhile and will continue to be. Anywho here’s our blog from last week!
¡Hola! ¡Hola! From Rancho Esperanza…though I must say we’re severely lacking in hope (esperanza) at the moment. Here’s our eventful yet unfortunate update of the past week:
Thursday we spent the day at Bonafide hard at work with our machetes…some of us even… Read More
Hey family and friends,
We just arrived in the small town of Noosa, Australia. Our 5 day stay at the Chenrezig Buddhist Institute was a great place to clear our minds and relax which was much needed after the past week. Unfortunately we lost two group members our last night in New Zealand. We were all heartbroken saying goodbye and have been adjusting to the loss of their presence since.… Read More
This week was terrible. All I wanted to do was ride a rhino. Not only would they not let me ride one, they wouldn’t even let us pet them. Just kidding! This week went far beyond any of our expectations and believe me, you DO NOT want to get too close to these ginormous majestic beasts. Upon our arrival at the rhino sanctuary we had a brief orientation followed by… Read More
Hello family and friends!
After an amazing week in Cuzco we are headed into the Amazon for a week to do conservation work. It was a rough ride getting to the town we will depart from on a 5 hour boat ride to get into the Amazon. There was a spontanious hail storm that started right as we were leaving our hostel for the bus station in Cuzco and two… Read More
Blake is back, back again, Blake is back, tell a friend!
Hello again everyone, our Southeast Asia trip has moved on from Thailand and we are now exploring Cambodia. Less than a week ago we flew here not really knowing what to expect, but excited to be here nonetheless. We weren’t disappointed by what we found. A couple of days ago we took a bike ride to three magnificent ruins:… Read More
This is Benjamin, signing in to tell you a little bit about our time this past week…
Like a television signal descrambling itself to create a coherent picture while begging broadcasted from one place to another, we needed a slight adjustment of our group operating system to go from Free Travel in Jamez Springs and Santa Fe back onto the reservation life, this time in San Carlos Apache, where we… Read More
G’Day Mate!
This week has been our first week in the land down under. We have kicked off Australia volunteering with the CVA (Conservation Volunteers of Australia). We started our orientation at the CVA headquarters in Adelaide, where we found out our projects and where our work sites would be and who was going to which work site, at the deep creek site was Bea, Tera, Emily, Katelyn, Evin and… Read More
Alright, 45 minutes to whip this out. 3, 2, 1, GO.
First of all, this week the group split, our OE the one and only Mr. Robbie Frankle, took the lovely Anna away to Brookfield, a conservation park about four hours from the rest of the group. Two gone, six left to a different park called Deep Creek. Well, the six of us and Rick, the hilarious, dread locked Aussie… Read More
I woke up the morning of the third excited for two things: it was the first day of free travel and my eighteenth birthday. While other teenagers may wake up on their eighteenth birthday in a dorm room or resting at home, I got to wake up to the beautiful mountains in Jemez Springs. The cottonwoods were changing colors to a patchwork of gold and red. It was a very… Read More
How creepy would it be to walk into a room in which every wall bears numerous crucifixes with all the macabre grotesqueness of the Spanish Inquisition? That was my first experience when I entered the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, NM during our free travel week. And from a first hand perspective, when you have the eyes of dozens of bleeding crucifixion victims looking down at you while… Read More
Hey everyone!
We’ve just arrived in Njombe after spending the past 10 days at the Igoda Children’s Village in Mufindi, where orphaned children without extended family can live. During our time here, we got to know the children and their guardians through a variety of activities. During the day, we were split into small groups and took turns visiting Igoda Primary School, the Kindergarten at the Children’s Village as well… Read More
So we as a group wanted to blog about our special safari experience in Ruaha National Park about two weeks ago, so here goes!
As we were driving from Iringa Town to Ruaha (a two hour drive on an open safari truck) we could feel the staggering heat cloud down upon us. We drove along a long, bumpy, dirt road with the dust billowing behind us for about an hour… Read More
