Finding mymy Swiss Sweetheart inin South America

I had an itch to travel, to be somewhere that didn’t involve waking up every morning to grey clouds and depressing BBC weather forecasts. Rain. Gloom. Dark commutes to and from work five days a week. Weekends spent in bed watching rain. That was my happy place – being tucked up in fresh sheets thankful that today I wasn’t driving to work in it.

I tell my family that I want to volunteer in Costa Rica.

“But you’re not gonna get paid.”

“But it’s a dangerous place.”

“But what if you hate it and don’t have a job to come back to?”

“But it’s so expensive.”

“But you’re supposed to be looking for a house.”

“But you’re gonna be so far away.”

But I couldn’t stay in the UK.

So I did it.

And met someone special.

Very special.

It’s Tuesday morning and sunlight filters into my eyes before I even open them. Crashing, ocean waves fill my ears and chirping crickets from the jungle that I’m on the edge of play songs I could quite happily listen to all day.

I open my eyes. Crystal blue waves lap over one another, a canoeing boat undulating a stone’s throw from shore. Palm trees blow in the breeze and cast shadows on my face. I slept under them last night on the hammock Yaz, one of the previous volunteers, left behind for me when she left to continue her travels. Two months, I’ve been here, and I don’t regret a single thing.

I’m volunteering at a turtle sanctuary and share an outside dorm room with twenty-three others. It’s not the reason I’m sleeping outside on a hammock, though. I just enjoy the sound of crashing waves and the combined saltwater-sap smell. It tops the aroma of stove-hot coffee by miles.

Duties here involve raising turtles and breeding them in safe environments so they’re out of the way of predators. When independent enough, we release them into the ocean – something on the agenda for tonight.

After a morning stretch, I manoeuvre through Florida strangler trees back to camp and help with the morning campfire to prepare breakfast – gallo pinto served with fried eggs laid fresh this morning.

It would be very selfless of me to, off my own back, prepare breakfast for the camp every morning, but in truth, I do it for selfish reasons.

Sidney.

He’s Swiss and from a tiny village called Grindelwald. The restaurant that he owns, as head chef, is popular with both locals and tourists, and people travel across countries just to enjoy his cheese fondue. Apparently it’s rated one of the best in the world.

“What’s the secret ingredient to the fondue?” I ask him as we crack eggs into the pan.

“It’s a secret.” He winks. “So I’m not allowed to tell.”

He arrived one month after me and my heart skips a beat every time our eyes accidentally catch one another’s. It’s unexplainable, the way I feel about him, but ever since he set foot at camp with his thirty-litre Osprey backpack and sweating brow, things here have changed.

Prior to his arrival, I was basking in the sun and going to sleep at night with turtles on my mind. Now I shut my eyes and think about him.