Don’t ya just love conquering a fear? Shelley’s phobia was a bit of a weird one: the cute, furry, slow-moving, completely unthreatening mammals that are sloths. Tune into the How Are You? Where Are You? podcast to see if Shell could overcome her very own fear factor in Costa Rica.

Our bestie Terry the Tent has had a rough ol’ time of late. We fill you in on his trials and tribulations involving a frog.

All this and more as we take you on a bike trip across Costa Rica, up hill and down dale, scoffing down rice and beans and yelling out “Pura Vida!”

Clockwise from top left: the imposing Arenal Volcano; Baden deals with all sorts of mechanicals roadside; Shelley rides through banana plantations, harnessing wind power on Lake Arenal; and more bananas (they’re everywhere on the Caribbean coast).

Clockwise from top left: watching the World Cup final in a bar in Puerto Viejo on my laptop; Costa Rica has the coolest money (whack a sloth on there); the drummer from Sloth Leopard has only got one arm; Marco helps Shelley overcome sloth fears; Baden clutches a fresh baguette handed to him by a kind Costa Rican, “Pura Vida.”

I’ve been afraid of sloths since I discovered them. They had qualities that I didn’t like and this turned into an irrational fear.

The first thing people say is; “But sloths always move so slowly, they’ll never catch you!” On my recent trip to the Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica I learned that this is not necessarily true along with loads of other interesting facts. Read More →

Found this shocking story on the Guardian website a few days ago and was outraged. A hard drive holding testimony from survivors of the civil war in El Salvador was stolen from the Washington office of a human rights organisation. The CIA are in the frame for this despicable act as survivors continue to search for justice more than 20 years after the war.

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