And via injury, more later.
Immediately after my last post, there was a dinner party a casa Randall, but I felt like crap and went down with the shits half way through. I then picked up Pol's cold (another volunteer, who had been ill before going on a trek, getting drunk, and then it came back with a vengeance) while my immune system was down, and that kind of laid me out for a few days. After that it was time for trek 2!
It was the 2 day Maragua trek again, this time with a group of Quebecois who were un poco fussy, and really quite slow. While on the first trek one of the girls was ill and I was suffering from altitude, but this time there were no problems at all, we stopped FAR less, and still arrived at the same time (8.30, after 2h walking in the dark, and that made them complain a lot more even though we'd told them that would be the case). My French got a little work out, but I wasn't really quick enough to join in on many of the conversations, but I don't think they realised until I told them the next morning that I'd understood almost everything they'd said while they were complaining!
Still, I shouldn't complain about them, 2 of them who I had dinner with later loved the experience overall, and actually recommended us to a guy they met (and was later on my third trek) after they'd left Sucre. I had found it pretty stressful though, and decided to drink lots of whisky and wine that night! The next day was not so fun, it was kind of a Gap Yah day, probably more because I'd shared a bottle of water with a guy who was complaining that he was feeling a bit sick (and I'd ignored this because I assumed he was just complaining in the same vein that a couple of others had been the evening before) than the alcohol. This laid me out for another few days.
During my two illnesses I was looking at a few apartments with Franz (another of the 5 volunteers), because Randall's house is technically only meant to sleep 4, and the legally binding contract says so. One house we looked at was utterly beautiful, more of a castle than a casa, with 6 large bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a 'guest bathroom' without a shower for people in the massive downstairs party/restaurant/lounge room and excellent views over Sucre and the surroundings. One balcony had a huge BBQ area, and we were wondering how expensive inflatable swimming pools were for the other balcony (and yes, 'balcony' obviously does NOT do it justice). Unfortunately, at $550/month, small budgets and a preferred minimum lease of a year it was a little out of our price range unless we could find people to stay with us, and we only had a day to do that before the landlord went back to La Paz. Yes, I did consider phoning the bank of Mum and Dad to ask if they'd buy the place to retire to!
The apartment we ended up getting was 3 bedrooms for $300/month, much more centrally located and well-furnished. Franz is staying for 6 months so that's the length of lease we went for, and we have since found a third flatmate - Brid from Ireland - who is staying for a couple of weeks and can pay a bit of rent during that time.
Around the time we actually moved in (I think it was last Saturday) there was a group out with Patrick on the same 2 day trek (it's pretty popular!) who will forever more be known as 'the ear group'. They had a little problem when a French girl suddenly started screaming 'It's alive!!' in the middle of the night, and after a few minutes of panic and questioning found out that it wasn't a spider or a mouse, but something in her ear! Obviously this had to be questioned, but she'd just been to the jungle and when the guide asked here if it made a noise 'like this' she said yes, so she got a bit worried that something was about to start munching on her brain. Cue Patrick having to get up and phone Randall to find out how the hell you get an ambulance to Irupampa (the village we stay in in the crater), which meant a good 30min walk in the pitch black, exceptionally bad signal and running out of credit. Randall then spent ages phoning back, phoning emergency services and even phoning rival companies who had 4x4s that could make it there, but no-one could be bothered getting up in the middle of the night to drive there and help someone who could technically walk. This had to happen the day after Randall damaged his manly parts in a bike accident (I would be more specific, but it seemed to be most of them!). In the morning they ended up having to walk down to the end of the trek anyway, and the bus (I'm being kind and some people seem to think misleading - it's a flatbed truck with loads of people and standing room only for most gringos) was full so it didn't stop to pick them up. Eventually they convinced the nearest doctor with an ambulance-ish 4x4 vehicle to give them a lift to the hospital back in Sucre, but on the condition that they walk out of town and he meet them another way so that the locals wouldn't know and get pissed off. Still, they all apparently loved it, and recommended it to loads of other people!
I think my third trek must have left on day 19, with a bunch of people who had met Patrick and the ear group in their hostel and thought it sounded good. We found out about this on Sunday night, far too late to go to the market, but luckily we'd made too much salsa for the previous trek and it was in the freezer. In the end it was a great group, and I've now had a few good nights' drinking with those who remained in town and the remnants of the ear group (for the record, the hospital said it was an ear infection), one of whom decided she was going to host a dinner party in my lovely new apartment tonight! I don't know much more about this, but hopefully I'll know more if she turns up with food.
The real excitement of the trek was my little injury though. There was an old campesino woman (think stereotypical rural Bolivian) with a baby in the sack on her back, and I saw a condor swooping down towards her and got a bit nervous. They're quite closely related to vultures, and the baby was asleep, looking kind of dead. Needless to say I ran over to intervene, and luckily I did manage to save the baby, but not before the condor managed to slice open my chin with one of its talons. They're bloody huge beasts, so I guess I was lucky not to come away with a lot more damage, but I think I managed to teach it a lesson by knocking more out of it that it took out of me (as some bloodstained feathers we found 50m down the path showed - shame I was too much in shock to take a photo!). Hopefully at least the scar will stay as a memento.
Day 24 was the start of trek 4 ('the cheese group', and still the same trek! I told you it was popular), and we had a Swiss guy and a Canadian guy, both in decent shape. I'd thought the third trek had been quick (arriving nearly an hour earlier than the previous two, despite a few good stops and a decent splash about in the river), but this time we managed to actually see the crater in the last of the light for the first time in ages (there are roadworks on the way to the start of the trek that slow us down by over an hour). When we got to the mountain hut the electricity was out, so we cooked by torchlight while we ate some cheese and crackers (1 Boliviano/10p for the crackers, and we'd picked up the cheese that was meant for a 3 day trek with 11 people on it, rather than a 2 day with 4, so we thought we'd make the most of having loads of really tasty cheese!). We also had a bit of an interesting time trying to cook quinua (neither Ruben the guide nor I had ever done it before, and it took AGES), so we played candlelit chess and draughts in the mean time. I should probably add that we got fairly drowned in typically Scottish weather which is exceptionally untypical in the Bolivian dry season (there is usually zero precipitation in June, July and the first half or more of August), but to be honest it did make the place look prettier to me! Also, it meant we kind of wanted to eat indoors, so we found a campesino guy and asked to use his house to have lunch, then we gave him a small lump of our 2-3kg of cheese along with a little bit of bread and veg to say thanks after we were warm, dry and well-fed.
Needless to say, 2-3kg of good cheese doesn't last long. We had left it in the office overnight (we couldn't be bothered taking lunch stuff away to Randall's house and back when it was going to be used the next day anyway), and this only made it better than the bit we tasted in the mercado when we bought it. We then accidentally left it in its box with the lid off overnight in Irupampa, and it tasted even better, so by the time we'd got the 'bus' back to Sucre (and met the people from the three day who'd actually bothered to turn up on the same 'bus') we thought it was high time we finished it off in the office.
Anyway, it turns out the dinner party is definitely happening tonight - Sam just got a call saying they were starting the cooking, so I think I might just have to head back home! Ciao for now!
