Where to Start

I promised a few photos... even though these don't have much to do with the following post, here are some from our current home in Las Pilas, partly to show, that yes, it really is cold here! Hmmm, having blogger photo loading issues... I'll try again soon!

That’s true of this particular entry, but also of our current phase in the Peace Corps process. I have been a bit delinquent in this post, not that you might notice, but from where I sit I haven’t been writing much of late. The last entry was on my birthday… and, well I might as well begin right after that…

We had been down in La Palma to use the internet and do our “big town” shopping. As we were on the bus heading back up our crazy steep hill we had reached the main crest, and we were starting on the first little downhill, when the bus lurched forward, and then stopped. There was some murmuring from up front, and then I noticed some smoke coming from the floorboards. Now, switch your thoughts to any of a dozen disaster Hollywood flicks, Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, whatever… (I got to age myself good with those references!). You know how crazy people acted in those films? Well, that’s what the bus turned into in a few short seconds. People started rushing for the exits, and since the smoke was up front, most turned towards the rear exit. Plastered on every face that was heading my way was a look that people have who know at any moment this bus is going to become a huge ball of plasma that will put the Death Star to shame.

Now, usually the buses here are fairly calm and only marginally packed…. not like the famed Chicken Buses of Guatemala. In fact what little livestock does occur on our buses here is remarkably well behaved…. Except… except when said fowl is being used to club everyone who is between you and what thin hope for survival you see in the hazy light of the exit door. It was chaos. It would be funny except for the very real fear those people had. I have to blame Hollywood. Is there a clash action suit out there for people injured by people who are over-reacting to an unrealistic fear instilled by action films and Hollywood’s need to find some effect to justify their budgets? Because people were hurt that day through no fault of the bus. One older woman was pushed out the door, another stumbled in the gutter and wrenched her ankle, there were a number of cuts and things like torn fingernails. I slipped out the door fairly easily, but hey, how many years of football did I play? I started trying to help folks who were exiting, but still trying to avoid breathing too much of the oily smoke. I could hear Katie back inside the bus yelling “Tranquillo, tranquillo!”. In the end everyone made it off the bus, and somehow blowing a head gasket and spilling a bunch of oil on hot engine parts didn’t result in a good ball of flame. You could see the disappointment.

So, after it looked like things were more or less under control. People were attending the injured folks, sometimes in not so good way, but this didn’t seem like the time to try to teach some basic first aid principles. Now we made like the crazy gringos that we are and started walking! It was made all the more amusing by the fact that we had actually purchased more than our usual groceries and were carrying with us two large pillows and an automatic drip coffee maker. The bus broke down in the canton of Rio Chiquito, so we had about 4 kilometers, maybe 5 to walk. It was a nice day, and we made good time, partly because we agreed not to try to explain to anyone what we were doing.

That was on Friday, and for Saturday we had agreed to meet up with another volunteer to hike up a river valley as part of a study he was doing for his masters. This meant getting up early and hopping on the bus to go back down the hill. The one and a half hour trip back down to San Ignacio was uneventful. We planned to walk up the Rio San Ignacio, which is pretty much the river valley our steep crazy road parallels during most of its uphill journey. It would be great to finally get a look at the canyon that we had only seen from way upslope.

It was perfect weather, sunny but not too warm. The hike started uneventfully with the exception of trying to get the GPS devices to work correctly. Normal problems there. Anyway, it was nice to get out and hike up a creek. I kept looking for fish, there aren’t any and I know it, but habits die hard. We were there for geology, so we looked at the rocks a lot. We tried to determine what the base rock layer was, and to see if we could locate the transitions between the base materials. Overall it’s as good as any excuse to hike up a pretty canyon. The idea was that we would hike up the canyon to the upper reaches where there were some good landslides, to take a good look at one or two of those, and then hike up to the road to catch the bus (uphill bus for Katie and I, downhill for the other volunteer).

This all went fine for quite a few hours. It was great to get out and spend some time with another volunteer who has been in country over a year already. Good conversation, and we got to learn things too. Then we ran into the first waterfall. It wasn’t too bad, but it did require some actual climbing, and we did feel the need to watch out for each other. This was just the beginning. Circumnavigating the various falls became gradually harder. This was part of the deception, because it was never that much harder than the last one, and we had already managed that, so why not go on?

Eventually we came to a fairly large waterfall and started looking for ways around it. I had stated up one route that looked feasible until fairly high up it just got too risky. coming back down I found that Katie and the other volunteer had made it up a fairly slick slope. When I tried to follow I found that their previous passage had made it even more eroded and risky so I decided to look for another route. Going to the opposite side of the canyon, I finally backtracked far enough to find a route up and around, only to find that if I dropped back into the canyon above the one fall, there was another right afterwards that was even higher.

We started a yelling conversation back and forth across the canyon. They thought it would be too unsafe to try to come back down their side and join up with me. So we both decided to just start heading up the slope, and look for roads out. Now my side was the side with the main road where our bus runs, but their side went off to some untraveled road. We knew that we should be able to meet up in Rio Chiquito, but weren't sure how far off that would be. The climb out, especially after all of the previous walking was hellish. Katie and York (the other volunteer) ran into a coffee plantation which made their steep walk a bit easier. May side was clearer, and I ended up running into a local guy, who I 'm sure thought we were crazy… but he showed me the local route out to the road. Once there I called Katie and York to find out how they were doing. They had also found help and had made it to a road, but it was not much traveled…and still a long way from Rio Chiquito. We both started our respective hikes uphill. Very uphill, I have new respect for our bus having to travel up and down that road several times each day. You don't really feel how steep the road is until you walk it with tired legs.

To hasten a long story, we did meet up in Rio Chiquito, though they had the much harder walk than I. From there we hired a truck to carry us to Las Pilas aka home. York had to spend the night with us, as all buses downhill had passed long before. The end result was that in the last two days, Katie and I had effectively walked the whole route from San Ignacio to home, what is normally a one and a half hour bus ride. The next morning a whipped up a batch of hot salsa, eggs and hashbrowns to help us recover. Good stuff! Well, part of our goals in coming here were to have more activity in our jobs… that seems to be working out.