Car­la Rauseo

Last Sat­ur­day morn­ing was spent do­ing my usu­al house­hold chores, un­aware that I would soon find my­self dri­ving through low dark clouds, mist and driz­zle on the treach­er­ous­ly wind­ing moun­tain­side road to­wards Bras­so Seco in the cen­tral part of the North­ern Range to run a Hash. The things we hash­ers do! It's no sur­prise oth­ers think we're mad! Two hours of dri­ving lat­er, our spon­tane­ity was re­ward­ed when we were greet­ed by a fired-up kiln at the Bras­so Seco Vis­i­tor Cen­tre, smok­ing away as it cooked chick­en and bread with­in its clay shell. Not on­ly was it a wel­come scent, but the warmth ra­di­at­ing from the kiln was re­ceived with great plea­sure on a cold, rainy af­ter­noon in the heights of the North­ern Range. What a beau­ti­ful place! I did not quite re­alise our ex­act lo­ca­tion un­til I loaded the GPS (Glob­al Po­si­tion­ing Sys­tem) re­sults of the pa­ra­me­ters of the hash on­to my com­put­er. Tech­nol­o­gy to­day is fab­u­lous, and af­ter see­ing what this new GPS watch can of­fer com­pared to my old­er one, I can on­ly imag­ine how its use could im­pact ge­og­ra­phy ed­u­ca­tion in schools! I am thor­ough­ly en­vi­ous of Ge­og­ra­phy stu­dents and teach­ers to­day! What a fan­tas­tic way to blend fit­ness, na­ture and ed­u­ca­tion! Not on­ly is this a great piece of train­ing equip­ment, I re­al­ly think that it has the po­ten­tial to be an ex­cel­lent teach­ing tool for Ge­og­ra­phy.

My new GPS watch has nu­mer­ous abil­i­ties. It tracks dis­tance, to­tal elapsed time of the event as well as the time spent on the move, pace and speed, al­ti­tude, and even cal­cu­lates the num­ber of calo­ries burnt per event. It doc­u­ments one's speed and dis­tance for each mile cov­ered so one can com­pare one's per­for­mance through the dif­fer­ent miles along a route. It al­so has a heart rate mon­i­tor, which is ex­treme­ly use­ful when do­ing heart rate train­ing. But the GPS does not stop there. Once I've com­plet­ed my train­ing, I can log on­to a Web site and up­load all the in­for­ma­tion doc­u­ment­ed in the GPS to the Web site. This is my favourite part of the GPS pack­age be­cause the Web site then gen­er­ates a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the train­ing route (see in­set) us­ing a map, along with graphs show­ing how one's el­e­va­tion and speed varies with time over the course.The Web site al­so us­es Google Earth to gen­er­ate a satel­lite im­age of the lo­ca­tion and then su­per­im­pos­es the route over the im­age. The abil­i­ty to use this in the class­room would make ge­og­ra­phy every stu­dent's favourite sub­ject! It is just that cool! This hash was par­tic­u­lar­ly fas­ci­nat­ing to me be­cause I was able to not on­ly pin­point ex­act­ly where Bras­so Seco was, but I was al­so able to trace my ex­act route through the North­ern Range. If I zoomed in on the satel­lite pic­ture, I could see the vil­lage at which the hash be­gan, the rivers I ran through, and the ter­rain and its con­tours, with the moun­tains and val­leys. Zoom in far enough and the Vis­i­tor Cen­tre is vis­i­ble! The de­tail is that de­fined!

The Web site could even tell me at what points I slowed down and sped up, and I could see whether these points were up­hill, down­hill or flat. I could even see what kind of weath­er was present, as the cloud cov­er was vis­i­ble on the satel­lite map! The Web site pro­gram al­so al­lows users to com­pare dif­fer­ent cours­es that they have run. I looked at an­oth­er hash I did in Port-of-Spain, start­ing and end­ing in Wood­brook. The ef­fects and scars of de­vel­op­ment were high­light­ed in a very straight, flat and planned course, in­dica­tive of the city blocks and re­claimed, struc­tured lay­out of the town. In stark con­trast was the wind­ing, un­even route through the lush, green, moun­tain­ous for­est of Bras­so Seco. Yet an­oth­er Ge­og­ra­phy les­son and a re­minder of what we must cher­ish and pro­tect. Now know­ing ex­act­ly where Bras­so Seco was lo­cat­ed, I was in­spired to re­search its his­to­ry. I dis­cov­ered that "Bras­so Seco" means "dry branch" which re­ferred to the fact that the area was lush vir­gin for­est pri­or to the 1900s. There­after, co­coa and cof­fee were in­tro­duced and the area saw the de­vel­op­ment of nu­mer­ous es­tates un­til the 1960s when the price of co­coa dropped and the es­tates were aban­doned. These es­tates are now be­ing re­vived with crops such as cit­rus, co­coa and christophene, the fields of which one can see on the way to Asa Wright as one as­cends the nar­row, wind­ing moun­tain in­to no­tice­ably cool­er tem­per­a­tures. In fact, the area has one of the high­est lev­els of pre­cip­i­ta­tion in the coun­try, and is a haven for rare birds, mak­ing it an eco-tourist's par­adise. This ad­ven­ture proves that fit­ness does not have to mean just sweat­ing, dis­com­fort, mus­cle pain and ex­er­cise. Fit­ness can in­spire many in­ter­est­ing things and it can tru­ly be a won­der­ful ed­u­ca­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence. In fact, the fit­ness im­prove­ments I made on this hash were sec­ondary to the ex­pe­ri­ence, the knowl­edge gained, and the rare glimpse in­to the won­der­ful hid­den places that our lit­tle cor­rupt coun­try has to of­fer.