Oakley Girls Hit the Road...
Jul 19 2007 / Los Angeles, CALast month the Oakley girls took a trip to Costa Rica for surf, surf and a photoshoot. Follow mountain biker Darcy Turenne’s update of their adventures here.
This year Oakley wanted to do something different. They wanted to show the world that being a pro female athlete isn’t all about fluff and giggles. It’s intense. We sweat. We get dirty. We can get hurt. Six of us were chosen to represent the face of strong, confident, and adventurous women for the Oakley spring women’s campaign and to do so, we were all loaded onto a plane bound for Costa Rica and shipped to one of the most remote regions of the country. Sound like fun? It was.
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If you put together the flags of all the countries that each of us athletes were from you’d think you were looking at a United Nations doctrine. Mizuki came all the way from Japan, Roxy from South Africa, Claudia Gocalves from Brazil, Niki Gudex from Australia, Kira Sheppard from the US, and me from Canada all to share some amazing experiences in front of a few lenses. All six of us were from different walks of life and brought different things to the table but immediately bonded like old friends. I really can’t stress enough how great of a thing that was seeing as we all lived together in a completely blind-less adobe house where the toilet was surrounded by the bedrooms and only shielded by half of a wall!
To start the trip off, our fearless leader and manager Liesl led our convoy of SUVs down roads that I wouldn’t even trust on my downhill bike. I was only a week and a half recovered from breaking four ribs on a prior Oakley mountain bike shoot and I’m pretty confident when I say that these roads were so bad that I think I re-broke all four during the drive. Liesl kept me well occupied though by being my singing sidekick as we belted through essentially every song on my iPod. As the bumps got bigger, we just sang louder…and probably scared away wildlife in the process. Eight hours and about 300 songs later, we arrived at Casa Miramar.
Our German guide and savior Axel showed us around our new home in the dark, warned us not to expect a warm shower for the rest of the trip, and after a quick lesson from Liesl on how to tuck in our bug nets and the importance of zipping up our suitcases so bugs don’t get in (ironically, at the end of the trip it was Liesl who had a scorpion the size of a kitten crawl out of her surfbag!), we all passed out in our sticky sheets for a very well deserved sleep.
When the sun came up the next morning we were greeted by one of the most beautiful views any of us could have imagined. The entire backside of the house looked over the Pacific Ocean and was surrounded by glowing green jungle grasses and trees that acted as a monkey superhighway. We were submersed in the sights and sounds of the jungle immediately and it was such a pleasant change to go from being woken up by garbage trucks and snowplows to being woken up by the scream of howler monkeys. Loud but welcomed. Another welcomed change was eating breakfast in a bikini!
Our first breakfast was exciting for many reasons. We got to meet the people who would be taking our pictures non-stop for the next week, the plans and activities of the shoot were revealed to us, and we discovered that we would be eating like royalty for the rest of our stay. I’m not sure which was most exciting, but I can tell you that there isn’t a morning that goes by since I came home that I don’t think about the giant whole wheat banana pancakes that greeted me every morning in Costa Rica. As we inhaled our breakfasts this is what we found out we had in store: zip lining, fig tree climbing, waterfall repelling, boat tripping, snorkeling, and visiting a monkey sanctuary. Okay, maybe the banana pancakes weren’t the best part of Costa Rica.
Day one allowed us to settle into our jungle pad and spend a little much needed one on one time with the local beaches. When my plane took off from Vancouver it was amidst a snowstorm so the very idea of jumping into the ocean without a wetsuit almost blew my mind! After a 15 minute hike down some very uneven rooty stairs (even the hiking trails were much better maintained than the roads), we came to the beach and took our first of probably 100 glorious swims of the trip. We bobbed and floated around for a bit until finally it was time to get fitted for the clothes we would be shot in. Earlier in the day Liesl had asked Axel if he could find some seamstresses from the town 45 minutes away to help us fit our clothes. Seemed like an easy task to all of us, so when Axel came back from his day’s mission stressed and covered in sweat we were all wondering what the big deal was. Well, it turns out Axel had to track down the two ladies from the middle of the jungle because they were the only two people in the region that had portable sewing machines (both of which looked like they had come straight from an antique show!). Despite that, the ladies had mad sewing skills and one even helped me build my bike up. In fact, my rotor was so bent that my wheel wouldn’t go into place and she tried for so long that I had to tell her “manana gracias” about ten times before she would quit trying.
Like breakfast, dinner was a feast fit for kings…or queens in our case. If there is something that Kira, Roxy, Mizuki, Claudia, Niki and I all have in common it’s that we like to eat a LOT. It was pretty hard to hold back too when you had fresh caught fish, local veggies, gourmet salads, and desserts made from scratch staring at you after a day of romping through the jungle. So we didn’t. We ate, we laughed, and we ate some more. This trend continued every night until we got home. That’s when I realized I had gained 5 pounds but it was well worth every ounce!
The Oakley Girls Road Trip: Continue the story here
