YOUNG Bermudian Ashley Gamble had decided that she wasn't going to spend her "gap" year loafing on a beach in Thailand, but when she decided to join the Raleigh International expedition to Costa Rica, she could not have imagined that she would be in the first youth party to walk the 200 kilometres across that small country from the Caribbean to the Pacific shores.

The 19 year old finished her schooling last summer at Millfield in England, and she planned to start at the University at Birmingham this September to study events marketing and management.

"I wanted to do something positive with 'gap' year, not just do some aimless travelling," said Ashley. "I thought it would be constructive to on a Raleigh expedition, and I chose Costa Rica over Malaysia because I speak Spanish, and this was an opportunity to improve it. Also, I knew that there were some interesting diving trips on the Costa Rican expedition."

Ashley's headmaster at Millfield is a Raleigh trustee, and a Raleigh staffer had given a talk at school on the organisation's expeditions, but she was also influenced by very positive reports of a Raleigh expedition from a friend of her older sister Astra.

In January, she flew with other Raleigh "venturers" to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, and they were driven for more than two hours deep into the country, to their base camp at Turrialba, a small town beneath a slumbering volcano.

"There were about 120 'venturers' from a number of countries on the expedition and about 40 Raleigh administrators and guides," said Ashley. "But Turrialba was only the field base, because all of us took part in three separate projects while we were in Costa Rica, and we were divided into groups of between ten and 15 for each of them.

"The base was a rented farm where the Raleigh office had been set up for the expedition leader and deputy, and field base staff and drivers, with radios for communications with the different parties."

In line with the inclusive Raleigh philosophy, some 20 per cent of the venturers were fully subsidised young people from the host country; others were from Nicaragua, and the rest were sponsored or partly-sponsored venturers from the UK, and those, like Ashley, who paid their own way. Ashley's first project saw her travel further off the beaten track to a remote village.

"Our group's first expedition took us to a village called Cabagra, for an ongoing community project where we planned to tap a spring and lay a three kilometre pipe to bring clean water from higher in the mountain down to the village," Ashley recalled.

"That was hard work. We walked two hours up the mountain to get to the work site, and then we dug a trench a metre deep. But it was worth it to see what it meant to the people.

"The villagers were shy of us at first, but by the end of our time there, we had gone to church with them, and lived with them, and shared their small but spotless houses. We ate with them, mostly rice and beans, some fried banana, perhaps a porridge for breakfast. Our efforts meant so much to them, and they thanked us so much for having worked on the project, and said how wonderful it would be for their children to have clean water from the mountain."

After three weeks at Cabagra, Ashley's group were driven back to base to get ready for the second expedition. It was the 'marquee' project, never before accomplished by a Raleigh expeditionary group: a 200-kilometre walk across country from the beaches of the Caribbean to the Pacific shore.

It would mean trekking for 17 days through tropic jungle in sapping heat behind a guide cutting trail with a machete, over mountains and through remote hamlets down to the coastal plain.

"It had never been done before, despite a few attempts," said Ashley. "It took ten days to get through the Amistad, the densest jungle in the country, which is part of an indigenous reserve. We had to take a native guide who led us through jungle and over the Talamancan mountains."

SHE went on:"We were the first 'western' people to walk through there, at a pace of about three kilometres a day, and we were told that only a few of the native guides had been all the way through it. The guide had to hack through the jungle with machetes for the entire ten days; there were no roads or tracks. It was really tough; despite wearing trousers and shirts in the jungle, I was covered in scratches, and some of the trail over the mountains was very muddy and steep."

After ten days of jungle, the venturers emerged in the village of Ujeras, and continued west and south to the Pacific coast.

"From there, we were mainly on dirt tracks through mostly unpopulated country, with only the occasional small settlement. The people were really surprised when we appeared, but very welcoming. Visitors are very rare, and when our group descended on the pulperia, the little general store, the owners were very glad to see us! We were walking about 20 kilometres a day then, from village to village, in quite high temperatures, in the 90s."

The group followed orders to radio the field base at Turrialba twice a day to report on their progress, and each of the group took turns to set up the radio and position the antenna, and make the report to base.

"Our coast-to-coast expedition was a big thing at Raleigh, because it hadn't been done before, and if we hadn't completed it, they weren't going to try it again. When the other groups radioed in from their projects, they all asked, 'Where is coast-to-coast'? So, when we got to the Pacific, there was a lot of excitement. I can't properly describe the feeling of accomplishment when we saw the ocean, but I'll remember the way I felt all of my life."

After another break at Turrialba, the group went back to the Pacific coast, to environmental projects in a private nature reserve at Curu Bay.

"We worked on projects involving scarlet macaws and spider monkeys," explained Ashley. "The park is protected, but the two brothers who own it want the waters of Curu Bay to be protected too, and Raleigh is helping by building and maintaining two artificial reefs, one of them a boat deliberately sunk at the location. They are helping to protect and diversify the fish population.

"We were living in an A-frame shelter on the beach, and because we were a static site, we operated a 24-hour radio to communicate with all of the other projects, and we did one-hour shifts twice a day on the radio, around the clock.

"We had a small gas stove, but the food on the entire expedition was always fairly basic: 'bean-feast', a lot of rice and beans, and pasta. And tins of tuna, everything had to be food that would 'keep', but at Curu, we could walk for an hour to where a small van sold fruit, and spend our Raleigh fruit budget!

"We actually ate a lot, all carbohydrates, but with all of the trekking and working in the heat, some people lost quite a few pounds, and one guy at Curu lost about 35 pounds in the ten weeks.

"After getting qualified to dive in open water, we worked on the reefs, doing fish identification and surveys. We would spend 30 minutes at a time underwater, two or three times a day,counting the numbers of different fish species, and later fill in reports for an international reef survey.

"We did more than a hundred surveys between us. On other reefs, we studied different corals, and did surveys of different species and the ratio of live to dead corals"

Ashley, daughter of Alan and Clare Gamble, and granddaughter of the late Frank Gamble, for years the head of Bermuda Red Cross, came home to Bermuda just last week after her ten-week venture in Costa Rica.

RALEIGH International Bermuda director Michael Spurling invited her to talk about her experiences to the group of young Bermudians who have been training for their expedition, which leaves in July for Sabah, in the tropical jungle and rivers of northern Borneo.

"It was a great experience, and although the Bermuda group listened politely to what I said, they got much more excited when I got out the lap-top and showed them the CD of the pictures I had taken, because then they could envisage themselves on the ground, in country.

"They saw the people on the expedition, how Raleigh organises things, the villages and the people, and the work on the projects. I showed them my favourite, a shot of the beach at Curu Bay at sunset, and they know they will come back with great memories like that.

"You meet so many different people on expedition, and I made a few really close friends whom I expect to stay in touch with over the years. We have already been e-mailing each other since I got here, and I will meet up with them when I get back to the UK."

However, perhaps the most encouraging news for the 11 young Bermudians who are thinking ahead to their long journey to Sabah is that Ashley enjoyed the experience so much that she has decided to go back to Costa Rica, not in five years or next year, but right now.

"I came home to see my Mum and Dad, whom I hadn't seen since Christmas, but instead of going back to England to spend four months working in a pub before I start at university, I am going back to Costa Rica.

"I loved it so much, and I miss it already. A few of us who went to Curu on the last phase decided there was so much we could do there at the reserve. Life is so simple there, living in those cabins, and you can get by on $50 a week. We may not do the diving this time, because that's more expensive, and we're on a tight budget, but there's lots we can do to help with the scarlet macaw and spider monkey projects."

Ashley seems a very grounded young woman who intends to develop clear goals in her life, and in a very modest and unpretentious way, gives an impression of having inherited a genetic tendency to give something back.

"I'll probably come back in mid-June, so I won't be there too long, but I really want to go back. I feel I haven't quite finished some things I can do. Before I start at university and the rest of my life, I have this chance to do something I will remember forever.

"That's why I was so happy to talk to the Bermudians going to Sabah. I had just flown in that morning from Costa Rica, and I was so excited for them. Some of them had never been out of Bermuda before, and I told them that this would be a life-changing experience.

"It's the opportunity of a lifetime to see things and do things and meet people from completely different cultures, from other worlds than here."