I'm off on another hairy adventure tomorrow morning so I figured I had better post some pictures from my last one before I go. Undocumented adventures are adventures that have not yet been milked for all they are worth, and it would be a shame to not milk a good adventure.
However, if I try to organize it into a neat, logical, chronological story I will never get it posted at all. So here, in no particular order, is an abbreviated account of my saga:
The ride down was 15 hours long. The beginning of our trip consisted of weaving through black people dressed in black and wandering along crowded city streets in the dark. The end of our tripped consisted of bouncing along for 3 hours in the middle of wilderness, trying to guess the depth of the gullies and holes in front of the truck by how long it took our headlights to illuminate the bottom. This picture was taken about 2/3 of the way into the journey, when we first began to see mountains. You will notice that we are driving on the wrong side of the road. If you look in the lower right-hand corner you'll see a sizable pothole. A significant stretch of the journey was on road like this. Fortunately it was a weekend and there was not much traffic. Weaving across the road is more exciting when massive trucks are coming at you from the opposite direction!
Here is where we stayed. The center building is the kitchen, dining room, and general hangout. The huts around the perimeter are individual rooms.
I stayed in the hut on the left. My coworker is sitting in her doorway to read because the power didn't come on until 6:30 at night.
Here was my front door. The stone hopping went pretty smoothly as long as I wasn't carrying anything or it wasn't dark or I wasn't too sleepy.
Here is my room. On the right is an extra bed frame. It was uninhabited for the first day or two. Then my friend P moved in with me when he arrived from town. The window looks like it is covered with cloth. That's because it is. Not the most secure, but it did keep the mosquitoes out.
Here was the sink and shower in my hut. I am guessing that at one point there was running water, but no longer. I showered by dipping the small brown bucket into the large blue one on the floor and pouring it over myself. The bucket served as my faucet also. The water in the bucket was super frigid in the mornings. Our African friends taught us to draw water from the nearby well in the morning. Because it was in the ground all night it was much warmer.
The toilet was in a separate hut. We flushed it by pouring water into the toilet bowl from the barrel in the corner.
It was truly a beautiful area. I spent most of my free time wandering the hills and taking pictures. Here you can see my friend N riding up the trail on his motorcycle.
The village is nestled into the most hilly part of the country. Even though it hadn't rained in several months all of the trees were still a lush green.
One of the things I really appreciated about the village was the dark night sky. I love stargazing, so whenever I get out of the city I take full advantage of clear nights. I think the moon was tinted red because of all the dust in the air.
I am not sure which planet this. Somebody want to help me out?
Here it is again, in the middle of a starfield. It's fascinating to be so much closer to the equator. I can see the Southern Cross and other constellations that I never saw back home.
Moonlight silhouettes... so pretty!
Early one morning I got up and climbed the "mountain" behind my hut. It wasn't terribly tall but I found it to be much steeper than I had expected. I had to switch from walking to moving along on all fours, and soon I was doing more climbing than hiking. Unfortunately the rock face was covered with loose gravel, and dry grass was growing on top of that. The combination made it very difficult to keep my footing. When my feet slipped I would try to grab at the grass but it would pull out and I would start sliding down the hill. I had to move slowly and carefully, keeping my center of gravity as close to the hill as possible.
It was a bit of work but totally worth it. The dust and clouds kept the sun hidden until about half an hour after sunrise, so even though I got a late start I was able to get into a good position before the sun appeared.
The valley was criss-crossed with miniature smoke clouds from dozens of cooking fires.
At last the sun came out!
Far below you can see the village, with the church on the outskirts.
Here is another picture of the church, taken from a closer hill during some down time on the second day.
Guys in discussion under a tree. In the heat of the day, the shade of a large tree like this is a welcome comfort.
My word, there were some cute kids there!
This is too cool! A John Deere and a Case sitting next to a hut. When I was little I had a model tractor just like that John Deere. It is surprising, the things you find in a village like that. At one point we realized that we had forgotten some important documents. We wandered into the village and asked around to see if anyone had a computer. We ended up at a hospital, where a friendly young nurse said that yes, he had a computer that he ran off of the solar panels at the hospital and he also had dial-up wireless internet that he pulled from the nearby cell phone tower. So we had our friend in the city email the documents to this our new friend. We then when to a local government center to ask the man there if we could use his printer (it was the only printer in the village, as far as the nurse knew). The man went into his office and came out with an HP inkjet in his arms. So we carried that back to the hospital and hooked it up. Unfortunately our friend the nurse couldn't get his little laptop to connect to connect to the wireless modem, so we couldn't install the driver for the printer. Off he went to borrow a computer from one of his coworkers and soon he returned with a beautiful, big laptop. Unfortunately, it was all in Portuguese. He said that if I could figure out how to change the language to French that would be wonderful because the owner of the computer doesn't speak Portuguese- it was a gift from his father-in-law in Brazil. Sadly for the owner, and also for us, I couldn't figure out how to change the language.
I popped in the DVD and started clicking through the menus, choosing whatever option struck my fancy because I had no clue what the buttons said. That may be part of why it took nearly an hour to install the driver. The other cause was probably the fact that the poor Fujitsu was made to run XP and somebody had installed Windows 7. It was probably also crawling with viruses. But finally, finally, we got the printer installed and could print off our three sheets of paper. It had taken us 2 days, 2 laptops, 2 wireless modems, one printer, one nurse, and one government official, but we finally got it done!
This is one of the pastors from a nearby village. He is playing a traditional instrument called an item. Instead of having a reverberation chamber built in like a guitar or violin, you use your mouth as the reverberation chamber and open or close your lips to change the pitch.
On one of the first nights there they were burning away the grass around the huts to keep away the snakes. We took pictures in the fire, little knowing what was about to happen...
On the second to last day there a wildfire broke out on the hill that I had climbed earlier. In a couple of hours it was a serious threat to the huts at the foot of the hill, including the ones in which we were staying.
Fortunately the people have lots of experience with wildfires. Every year there are nearly 9 months of no rainfall so wildfires are almost an annual event. Here the boys are beating out the fire as it approaches a hay field.
Soon the fire was under control. Life went on as usual in the huts nearby.
Something about this hut reminded me of Hobbiton.
This building is much more strange. I was told that a rich Frenchman built it for his wife but she never actually came to see it. So there it sits, right on the edge of the city soccer field.
Dusty roads, take me home... this picture was taken on the way back home. There was lots of dust and several more grass fires. Between the two it was a very hazy morning.
We saw tons of animals, mainly birds, monkeys, and baboons.
Isn't the little one cute?
What a handsome baboon!
We saw a lot of these birds on the road. We realized that the wildfires were chasing them away from their nests. It was pretty sad actually.
There were lots of other small adventures, and one major one- a flat tire. But it's already 10:00 and I haven't started packing for my next trip, so I'll have to save that for another day.
