We started with an early breakfast at 7 with seats right by the front of the restaurant overlooking the volcano watching birds over the water and then headed over to the reception to be picked up at 8:15 for Sky trek. When we arrived, we put our bags in the lockers and got kitted out with equipment and they gave me a special helmet with a mount for my go-pro so that I could film from there rather than from my chest strap.

This morning we had a relaxing morning in the pool enjoying the swim-up bar and the views across to the volcano whose peak kept peeping out from behind the clouds. We got wood-fired pizzas for lunch by the pool overlooking the volcano and watching wildlife by the lake. We were picked up after lunch by Canoa Aventura for our volcano hike, which took us along the course of the 1968 lava flows to a view point where we had great views of the volcano and across to the Arenal Lake.

Originally our plan had been to fly from Tortuguero to La Fortuna but, due to maintenance issues with the plane, the flight was cancelled and there were no others available. Instead, we travelled by land - initially leaving Laguna Lodge on the boat and travelling by coach to Guapilles and then being picked up by Juan Carlos to take us the rest of the way. This meant that we were able to stop off at Tirimbina on the way where we had a guide, Luis, to take us around the reserve.

We started the day with an early wake up (not too hard as we weren’t adapted to the timezone yet) at 5am for coffee before an early morning boat tour leaving at 5:30 and taking us around the riverbanks and into the park spotting wildlife. The tour started with the local banks just up from the hotel where we started off with an Iguana lounging on a branch of a tree, just a little way up from a Tiger Heron (Tigrisoma fasciatum). José pointed out the different stages of coconuts growing along the side of the river as they go from green with mostly milk to brown with mostly flesh, we then saw a solitary howler monkey or ‘mono congo’ (Alouatta palliata).

After an overnight stay in San José, the next part of our travels began with a coach to the docks at La Pavona, followed by a boat from there to Laguna Lodge, as Tortuguero can only be accessed by boat or plane.

We set off from Hotel Presidente at 6:10 after a quick bite for breakfast. José, our guide, had met us at the hotel and took us to meet the bus with the others who were travelling to Tortuguero. After a couple more pickups we headed out of San José along the route 32 heading higher up as we left the city, passing alongside coffee plantations.

Costa Rica 2022 Tortuguero (13-14 Apr) Travel to Laguna Lodge Exploring Tortuguero Tirimbina (15 Apr) Arenal (15-17 Apr) Volcano Hike Zip-lining Monteverde (18-20 Apr) Arrival at Hotel Belmar Cloud Forest Reserve Finca Madre Tierra Hanging bridges Garden to glass

This weekend, to mark our 40th birthdays we planted Giant Sequoias with One Life One Tree at their planting site near Abergavenny. Sequoias are the world’s largest growing tree species and capture up to 10x more carbon per hectare than a traditional woodland, so should capture the equivalent of a person’s lifetime carbon footprint. The site in Abergavenny was previously a commercial woodland grown as a mono-culture so the projects involvement there will increase biodiversity on the site with the planting of Sequoias along with the additional native species they will be planting alongside them.

We had a fantastic weeks holiday up in the Peak District staying in Hathersage. We fitted in lots of exploring of the surrounding area, but still a lot more to see and do. On the way up to the Peak District, we visited my parents for a couple of days before heading on further. From there we stopped at Hardwick Hall on the way where we started with lunch before looking around the hall.

As jobs are often short running and finish before you can check anything within the pod, often it’s helpful to make the pod run for longer to be able to inspect the environment and re-run the job manually. One way to do this is to extract the yaml definition for a previous run of the job and create a pod definition replacing the command with an endless sleep. kubectl get pod {previous-job-pod} -o yaml > pod.