We arrived back yesterday at around lunch time and came up the community that evening. I didn’t think I was tired but as soon as I saw that the mattress was more than once centimetre thick, I was dying to sleep on it. Needless to say I slept so well that I would have made a baby look like a bad sleeper. And guess what, I GOT A LIE IN!!! Yeah I know I was fortunate enough to be able to lie in my bed until the ludicrous our of 6.20 (am that is). To give you some kind of prospective, that’s like an Abbotsholme boarder being able to sleep until 10am without a teacher yelling at you to get up.
Day 1:
Well, it all started on the Sunday. We got up at the usual time of 4.30am from our hotel (yeah, I know, it had satellite TV and everything. I’m not sure staying up late watching movies before a 5 day expedition is the best thing to do but then again I haven’t done it for almost 3 months so what do you expect).
We then got in the taxi (the back of a pick up truck) and began our journey.
The band of seven consisted of Eugenio, two of his friends, Nelson and Eberhart, Nata, Ram, Devin and me.The bridge at the river had been too badly damaged for vehicles to cross so you get taken to the bridge, carry all your stuff across on foot and then load up in the taxi waiting for us on the other side. So practical, in England people would spend months fretting and complaining about the broken bridge and then wait for a new one to be built, instead of just doing the sensible thing.
Anyway, we were dropped off at the start (another bridge, this time made of cable wire and some planks) and started our adventure on foot.
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It was beautiful! The sun was out but not too hot and by the time we had breakfast, we had amazing views of the two valleys on either side of the spur we were climbing.It was fairly hard going as it was solely an up hill day and seemed to keep on going, but the place was so breath taking that you only noticed how tired you were when you sat down to snack of fudge or a hand full of nuts.
We were fortunate to hit the cloud at the hottest part of the day because our water stores were beginning to run low and it was the heat that made it so tough. There were no trees at all until the last hour, which meant we had very little shade. I think, for that reason, the 1st day was the hardest physically but boy was it stunning.
I mean there aren’t many places where you can have breakfast with birds of prey riding the thermals next to you. Then again having black and turkey vultures circling around you does make you wonder if they know something you don’t.
Tapirs also make there homes in those mountains at such altitudes so although we didn’t actually see any, we did see a great deal of their faeces. Normally, poo doesn’t excite me much but how often do you see some from a tapirs.
However we did come across other interesting animals.
Literally as we were coming into the ‘camp site’ and Nata was announcing, “Here we are” in the relieved tone we were all feeling, Ram (in front of me) suddenly stumbled.
It looked as though he had gone to step in a place which he then realized was a hole or something.
Looking round him to see what it was, I discovered, in actual fact, the hole wasn’t a hole at all, it was a meter long, thick brown snake. I see now why Ram had tried so hard to avoid stepping on it. It was beautiful with a darker brown criss-cross, diamond pattern on its back. Unfortunately it began to glide away as soon as we spotted it so I didn’t get my camera out in time.
That night, most of us slept in the make shift shelter, whilst Nata and Devin slept outside under the tarp. I say slept, the wind was so strong that they found themselves lying under the stars and getting rained on, on more than one occasion. So I don’t think they got too much sleep that night.
