What Goes Up Must Come Down!

Well the time has come to face the walk out of site. It's not my favorite thing BUT today was sunny, VERY sunny. Which means some of the soft mud on the path had dried. (The road is a truck road and the truck creates groves & very much gets stuck and spins out: creating very deep rivets in the road which can be knee deep. No lie one literally went up to my knee!) So at first it was gonna be my host mama walking me down. Then it turned into my host parents. Well school got cancelled (Not an uncommon thing here at all, I'll write more about that another time) so five minutes in my brother and sister join the walk. All of us walked down 2.5 hours in the burning sun, literally burning. I coated in sun block and my face still looks lobster-ish. It is a tough hike and I did it with my AMAZINGLY cool ospray weighting in at 9 kilo  19.8lbs! I'm not gonna lie, there were moments I felt weak compared to my host family walking the road barefoot.  I did walk barefoot for parts of the soft mud but man the rocks HURT so I kept taking my shoes on and off. We got to the mango tree and the view was amazing. I'll try and add the photo I took. It made the rest of the walk to meet Laura nicer. 

Laura is a VITEL volunteer who lives 3+ hours away. However, she is someone who I will be seeing every time I need to go into town over the next year because the truck runs at 5 AM into the city and I don't see me doing the hike down at 2 AM in the dark. After meeting Laura at Espicos Bay it's another 1.5ish walk to her house but the stars aligned and as we were taking a small spell, a truck came by. Laura talked him into giving us a ride to her house. We were both grateful for that.

Once we got back to her place we changed and went for a swim in the saltwater near her house, mainly because it was hot and I was covered in mud!

Later that day we went to her school and painted a few more countries in her world map! It was pretty cool. Then we got run off by the rain, which felt amazing.  We spent the rest of the night talking and making an amazing dinner of curry beef and quinoa, with a piece of dark chocolate for a treat.

Tomorrow I'll be up around 4 AM to repack my bags and head into town to meet other volunteers before we fly back to training.

Until next time

Jump in the Jungle