The playground’s dedication, followed by children swarming in their Sunday clothes:

An an earlier, one-minute video tour of the just-completed playground from a few weeks earlier:

Under the guidance of a talented and unbelievably hard-working crew from the PBS affiliate in Boston, the Roadmonkey team worked with students, teachers and parents to create the playground, almost entirely from locally purchased materials. PBS joined our volunteer project, designed the playground and filmed its construction for a newly created program to show kids the beauty of using engineering for worthy community projects.

Mil gracias a Judy Lee & Adam Vollmer & Dorothy Dickie and their efficient and spirited Boston-based team. You guys were a pleasure to work with. Jason and Marsela and Nora of Fabretto: your hospitality and patience were beyond the call. Thank you.

We. Are. Very. Tired.

Goodnight from Nicaragua…

Paul

Christina checks her calculations as she helps install tree fort support beams.

The Roadmonkey crew is basically 10 people, including me and my co-leader, Juan Flores of San Diego (aka Juan Pablo Escobar because of the cheesy drug-kingpin shades he bought from a vendor down in San Juan del Sur). Juan, I and Stephanie (aka Estefani) have been the swingset-install team; Deborah J., Kim, Zaby aka Raby, and Carolee have been roaming from the musical drums to the spinning disk; meanwhile, over on the tree fort, Christina, Emily and Deborah R. have been hammering, measuring and drilling their way toward a structure that integrates two large trees into the heart of the fort. The students here are already in love with it.

Drill, baby, drill...

These students have put a lot of work into this playground, which was designed from our construction partners here, a PBS crew from Boston that is filming the building process for an upcoming program. In the process of our cooperative work with the students, we’ve started to get to know them ever so slightly, through bashfulness and initial reticence, to the point where they’ve taken a liking to a few Roadmonkeys in particular.

Roadmonkey Stephanie, aka Estefani, is a princess in the eyes of these girls.

The women on our crew are the natural magnets to the Fabretto students, whether girls or boys, making eye contact and trading questions with them and posing for photos much more easily than with the gringo men.

Amigas por la vida. (Friends for life.)

Each of our first two work days have been long: we rise at 6am, eat as much breakfast as we can, knowing lunch is five hours and a hot sunny morning away, and then break for an hour lunch at noon. Then we’re back to work by 1pm, working through the afternoon heat and dust, into dusk and then darkness. We’ve been wrapping up around 6:45pm, working by fluorescent light bulb when necessary, to ensure we stay on schedule.

The remains of the work day.

After our 12-hour workdays, we shower and eat an excellent dinner, prepared by the Fabretto house manager and cook, Nora. That’s usually followed by a round, or three, or more, of Toña beer, the group’s preferred Nica brew. I think we and the PBS people have plowed through about 70, beers after quittin’ time since Wednesday night.

All well deserved, mind you.

- Paul

But before I tell you all about the playground — which is going to be an incredible set of structures by Saturday night — please allow a brief recapitulation of the Roadmonkey surfing experience. In the photo below, Team Roadmonkey is doing its best Duke Kahanamoku impression, flanked by instructors (from left) Anna from Holland; Jonny from England; and Alfredo from Peru. (Juan Flores, the Roadmonkey co-leader, is the guy lying in the sand.) As the saying goes: The best surfer is the one having the most fun. By that measure, we were the best surfers in Nicaragua this week.

Roadmonkeys with their surboards at Playa Maderas, bookended by their instructors.

The group took advantage of one afternoon break, on Monday, to either relax by the pool of our surf lodge, called Mango Rosa, or take a 17-platform zipline canopy tour along the wild Nica coastline.

Christina Z. zipping down a Nicaraguan canopy tour, San Juan del Sur.

On Tuesday, our final day in the water, we resumed our surfing lessons. The water was unusually chilly. The sun, though, was radiant. Several Roadmonkeys caught waves. And vice-versa.

Stephanie S. and her very expressive wipeout, on Tuesday.

Then it was time to drive north to San Jose de Cusmapa, where we were scheduled to begin building a playground the following morning at a school run by the Fabretto Children’s Foundation. On the way north, we stopped for a roadside lunch. Even roadside lunch stands here have chefs, cooking chicken, pork, beef tongue, plantains and gallo pinto, the Nica rice staple.

Classic Nica lunch fare, on the road to Cusmapa.

After a long drive and a good night’s rest, it was playground-building time, working with not only Fabretto and the students at the school where this playground is being built, but also with a PBS crew from Boston, which designed the playground and is filming the construction for a new program to air early next year.

Kim M. digs deep, by hand when necessary, making a 3-foot hole for the swingset foundation.

The Roadmonkey crew, the PBS crew and the Fabretto staff are all housed at the Fabretto house in Cusmapa, a quiet alpine outpost only a few kilometers south of the Honduran frontier (not that there are any roads from here north; Cusmapa is pretty much the end of this particular long and gravelly road).

We began work today, Thursday, after a quick breakfast and sunny morning walk to the Fabretto school, where some 400 children take supplemental classes in English, math, critical thinking and other subjects, to augment their public school studies. In between class, many of the students came to the playground construction site to help us begin the three-day project.

A Fabretto student helps Carolee stack lumber for the Roadmonkey playground.

As Day 1 of this volunteer project ground into afternoon, the Roadmonkey crew and PBS team, including two engineers who designed the playground entirely from locally available materials, fell into a work rhythm that kept the dust, heat and blisters at bay.

Deborah and Emily help build the playground's tree fort foundation.

Part of the reason several Roadmonkey expedition members joined us was to have a chance to work with and interact with the children who will benefit from the playground. In between work assignments, several of us took breaks to talk to the students, mostly in whatever Spanish we could muster, plus a healthy dose of that international language known as talky-pointy.

Zaby aka Raby makes quick friends with a pair of toy walkie talkies.

The first day’s work included organizing into work teams that proceeded to cut lumber, dig holes (with ancient shovels, large pick-axes and heavy iron bars) and mix cement to secure the foundations our swingsets, tree fort and spinning disc, among other structures.

Judy Lee showing Carolee how to use a jigsaw.

The work didn’t end along with the remaining daylight. Instead of stopping at 5pm, we all worked until nearly 7pm, to ensure we stayed on schedule. More from the playground site tomorrow….

Night work: Making sure the posts for the tire swing are aligned & moored in cement.

Roadmonkey women (from left) Christina, Deborah, Carolee & Zaby, with Roadmonkey co-leader Juan Flores (left) and surf instructor Jonny Hillyard (blond dude).

Deborah R. catching a beginner wave, aided by Roadmonkey expedition co-leader Juan Flores.

Deborah J. riding high, with instructor Alfredo in the background

Roadmonkeys, from left, Emily, Zaby & Carolee, evalulating the waves.

Okay, we’re off for lesson no. 3 now….more soon.

Stay tuned,

Paul

On Friday, Roadmonkey launches it’s fourth adventure philanthropy expedition, to Nicaragua. Follow our progress here.

The first four days, we’ll learn to surf the mellow waves around San Juan del Sur, on the southern Pacific coast.

Then, on Wednesday, Mar. 9, we caravan six hours north, into the northern highlands, near the Honduran border, to a mountain-top town called San Jose de Cusmapa, to spend three days building a playground for some 400 school children. For most of them, this will be their first-ever playground. We’re building it entirely from local materials, input from the kids in the community. No prefabricated swingsets or slights or monkey bars on this project. To the contrary, this will be a unique, sturdy structure that incorporates Nicaraguan culture, art and homegrown natural woods to create a world-class playground you won’t find anywhere else….because it was custom designed by two professional engineers: Judy Lee and Adam Vollmer (read more on this below).

Our non-profit partner on this adventure philanthropy expedition is the Fabretto Children’s Foundation, which runs the school and which has been a steady, positive presence for poor children in Nicaragua for decades.

Pristine & empty: Playa Yanqui, south of San Juan del Sur.

Our playground building partner is WGBH Boston, the PBS station that has chosen to film this Roadmonkey volunteer project as an episode of a new program showing kids how to use engineering to improve the lives of people in need in creative, sustainable ways.

I will be posting photos and daily updates to our 9-day  surfing and playground-building expedition. So please stay tuned to this blog. I’ll also be posting pix & updates – as long as internet connections & bandwidth allow – to Roadmonkey’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

Join us on this unique combination of physical challenge and volunteer work collaboration in Nicaragua. See you in Nica starting Friday!

Sincerely,

Paul

PS, If you’re reading this in the stone-cold, slab-gray deadzone known as the Northeastern United States, here’s the forecast for Nica this weekend. And I doubt next week will be any different.

Thursday Mar. 04 93°F / 73°F

Friday Mar. 05 93°F / 72°F

Saturday Mar. 06 93°F / 71°F

In June 2009, a 10-member Roadmonkey expedition team summited Mt. Kilimanjaro, at 19,345 feet the highest point in Africa, to complete the adventure portion of the Tanzania adventure philanthropy expedition.

Below are two 3-minute videos, professionally shot & edited by two expedition team members: Steve and Joanie Wynn of Bayside Entertainment, based in Marin County, Calif.

The first video shows the Roadmonkey crew during our 6-day ascent of mighty Kilimanjaro:

The second 3-minute video portrays our post-climb volunteer project: refurbishing an impoverished school outside of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital, and installing a sustainable filtration system to allow the children, many of who have been orphaned by East Africa’s AIDS epidemic, to drink the groundwater at the school. We also installed affordable, clean-burning gas stoves to replace more expensive & environmentally unfriendly wood charcoal cook barrels.

When we arrived at the school, some of the students, dressed in their uniforms, performed a lovely, cheorgraphed dance in one of the classrooms:

In June 2010, Roadmonkey will return to Tanzania, to climb glacier-capped Kilimanjaro once again and then, in the village of Babati, southwest of the mountain, build a fish pond for a new school.

Join us on this challenging, gratifying and memory-making adventure philanthropy expedition.

The article’s author, Mike Kessler, an award-winning Outside writer and self-described skeptic of the trend toward “voluntourism,” came to see Roadmonkey as such a good thing that he joined the company this year.

More on that later…

I and my co-leader, Michael Stephen Kessler, will be taking this small group via mountain bikes into some of the most heavily contested areas of the country during the war with the United States. We’ll make a day ride to the site of the almost unbearably gruesome My Lai killings, by an isolated and frustrated squad of American soldiers in March 1968. As I discovered during my scouting trip to this region in March, My Lai sits incongruously 1 km from a serene white-sanded oceanfront beach area.

The Roadmonkey expedition will pass through the town of Quang Ngai, on the central coast, then turn west on Highway 24 to take on the rolling hills and valleys that will swallow us into the jungly digestive tract known as the northern Central Highlands.

Students at the Kon Ray boarding school, Central Highlands, playing a local version of jump rope.

Five days of cycling through mountain passes, alpine forests and hot summer valleys (the seasons are different here than in North America) will put us in the frontier-like city of Kon Tum, the capital of a province that is home to dozens of ethnic minority tribes. The town names sound different here from other parts of Vietnam; tribal languages continue, and a visitor can see the differences from the majority Kinh (Vietnam’s dominant ethnic group) in the faces of local people here; it’s quite fascinating. There is also a poverty rate in this area that one doesn’t see, or see so viscerally, in other parts of Vietnam. I’ve thought of the tribal peoples as similar to North American native tribes in the economic and community challenges they face: education, health, environment, viability of traditional mores and sustainable development.

Roadmonkey’s volunteer project in Vietnam will be building an organic farm, 400 square meters in size, at a school for ethnic H’re, H’mong and other minority students in the Kon Tum region. Our non-profit partner for this project is the East Meets West Foundation, a large, organized and extremely effective American organization that has been building and creating health and education opportunities for Vietnamese people for two decades. My great thanks go to John Anner, EMW’s executive director, for inviting Roadmonkey to partner with his excellent group of managers.

Those managers include Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh Thu, EMW’s program director who began the Roadmonkey partnership with great effort and elan, and Ms. Vo Thi Hien, in Da Nang, who is as pleasant and easy to work with as she is organized and effective. These ladies are wonderful people to plan a complicated and challenging 4-day volunteer project with!

Teachers at the Kon Ray school where Roadmonkey's volunteer project begins, Nov. 6.

The current group of Roadmonkeys — six women and 1 man — raised more than $8,000 for our volunteer project at the Kon Ray school. That is truly amazing, and part of a growing tradition at Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy: our clients have raised more than $30,000 in tax-deductible contributions from their own social networks since last year, for the three volunteer projects they have completed in northwest Vietnam (Nov. 2008), Tanzania (July 2009) and now Central Highlands, Vietnam (Nov. 6-9, 2009).

That is, after all, what adventure philanthropy, and Roadmonkey, are all about.

Our November project is particularly urgent now, only a few weeks after Typhoon Ketsana roared through Central Vietnam, killing dozens of people and causing enormous damage. The Kon Ray school, in fact, saw its water-supply system washed away in the typhoon. Roadmonkey’s projects focus on sustainable programs. But in this case, given the urgent need for humanitarian and other relief, we and East Meets West have agreed to donate a percentage of the $8,000 we’ve raised to emergency projects to get the school and its people and students back on track.

Tomorrow I fly from New York to Los Angeles, to convene with my expedition co-leader and gear up for the 12-hour flight to Asia.

More soon from the road to Vietnam…

Paul von Zielbauer

After meeting with the impressive crew at Amazonas Explorer to discuss a rafting adventure next spring, I rented a mountain bike from Cusco’s most famous Scotsman, Dougie Stewart. Dougie has a huge inventory of killer Kona bikes, most all downhill fat-tire demons. I rented a Kona downhiller to ride uphill, steeply, for two hours, along a winding road arcing up into the hills overlooking the city.

Guinea pigs, caught wild, eaten con gusto.

Two hours of near non-stop pedaling, up grades that only a bike with an almost 1/1 gear ratio could make possible. I could have walked the bike faster than I was riding it at certain points, but there’s something to be said for consistency. So I stayed in the saddle….a cursed, evil saddle. My behind was numb after an hour.

I rode — pedaling maniacally in absurdly low gear, yet moving at a pace that can be described only as glacial — past the white monolithic statue of Jesus Cristo, overlooking Cusco below, and several Inca ruins, to and from which a trickle of other foreigners were walking. I envied them. All they had to do was put one foot in front of the other. Walking. What a concept.

On I peddled. Until I reached, finally, a windy, almost cold plateau that led to the turnoff for the village that Scotsman Dougie Stewart told me was the point at which all offroad trails lead back to Cusco.

“You can’t get lost. Evre’thing leeds bahk ta toun,” Dougie told me, blissfully. He offered to draw me a “wee map” showing that it was physically impossible to get lost.

Downhilling toward Cusco: Halfway to lost, two hours from the middle of nowhere.

Exiting town, of course, I promptly got lost.

Later on, back in Cusco, Dougie would tell me, “Ah, you taerned rrright, when you should’ve gone strrreight thrreuw toun.”

I really enjoy Scots accents.

Anyway, instead of the sloping, enjoyable offroad trails that Dougie told me I’d easily find back to Cusco, I found narrow, steep, and ankle-breaking rocky cowpaths that required me to carry the Kona bike on my back. I’d had enough downhill hiking in Peru, mind you. This was neither rugged nor fun. The sun was setting, I was in the middle of literally nowhere. No people, no animals, no man-made structures. Just big hills that looked…really cold to sleep on all night.

Do I turn back and take the highway back home, and know I wimped out? Or do I trust in the Scotsman’s proclamation: “You can’t get lost”? I had one hour of daylight. If I kept riding/carrying the bike further into the hills, presumably toward Cusco, I ran the risk of having to backtrack in total darkness on ankle-breaking terrain….carrying the bloody bike.

Sometimes you just give yourself up to the universe, and this was one of those times. I figured the worst that could happen was that night would fall, I’d be lost in the hills and have to slaughter a cow and slice open it’s belly and crawl inside to survive, like that scene in “Star Wars.”

But eventually, the deeper into the hills I rode (and carried the bike), I found signs of civilization. By “civilization,” I mostly refer to a litany of angry dogs that, no matter how small, seemed to think they needed to angrily nash at my ankles as I rode by their masters’ homes.

But dogs begat homes, which begat homeowners who pointed me in the direction of “toun.” By sunset, I was riding through the smoggy streets of Cusco….on a now-flat tire. I walked the bike back to the drop-off point and was happily exhausted.

In Cusco, Das Auto takes a back seat to Das Llama.

After a sound, desperately needed sleep, I spent one more day in town, absorbing its essential flavor and relishing the relative dearth of foreign tourists. Cusco is a pretty city for the uninitiated. The climate is cool, dry and crisp by day, chilly by night. It’s small enough at its heart for one to still glimpse any number of hearty old women walking their llamas through the narrow cobblestone streets.

Roadmonkey will be back here, in spring 2010, to raft the untamed Apurimac River, and hike the lesser-known segments of the Inca Trail around Machu Picchu.

Now, it’s off to Vietnam, to scout out Roadmonkey’s November expedition.

See you there!

- Paul