So much for the hot season so far. It’s summer here now, but I was dreading oppressive heat and dust, and the weather really hasn’t been too bad. A lot of mornings start out rainy or cloudy, and then by mid-morning, the sky is clear and it does start heating up. I recently planted some herbs and flowers in front of the house, so maybe this will be good weather to give it a better start than the other garden out back. In that one, we have a few renegade tomato plants growing from the compost we mixed into the soil, but besides that, just some bean plants and a couple of tiny watermelon plants have really grown much. Apparently, we put our garden on the wrong side of the house to begin with. That side of the house was excavated to make the adobe bricks to build the house, and the other side has a little less damage, so it would have been better…ah, hindsight.
A couple of weekends ago, we finally packed up our backpacks with camping gear and food and headed up the mountain—all the way up. The hike started in the familiar territory of the park, up to the visitor’s center, across the river twice, up the steep switchbacks to the fork with the waterfall-bound path, and then we crossed into the unknown (for us…lots of other people have been, obviously). The trail meandered up and down and in different directions as it hugged smaller mountainsides and crossed several little creeks/waterfalls where we filled up our water bottles. The water was really clear and straight from the ground, but we dropped in the nasty iodine pills just to be kind to our digestive systems. Around this part of the hike, we saw a lot of GIANT ferns that looked more like small trees than ground cover. Here is a baby fern all curled up:
We stopped for lunch at the first “campsite,” which was just an old building site littered with garbage and a pit toilet. That made me a little worried about the second campsite, which we were planning to stay at for the night. Still, it was a nice lunch in the sun, and everything tastes better when you’re hiking.
We went on from there, and the climb got a lot steeper. We followed a ridge for awhile, so the view was fantastic sometimes, and we also saw a little animal—our only real wildlife spotting of the trip. It looked like a raccoon/monkey/weasel, and was about the size of a large housecat. It had a long, striped tail, and just looked at us a little while, stood up on its legs like a prairie dog, and kept on climbing and exploring, like we weren’t even there. The vegetation changed many times, and the plants were amazing as we went on. Besides the giant ferns, we saw beautiful flowers, vines, bromeliads, really knotty old trees, interesting fungi…it was the jungle, and it didn’t disappoint. Once we reached the cloud forest, though, it felt like we had entered a different world. The canopy is so thick that it’s pretty dark, but the sunlight that does come through creates a green halo around all of the trees because of the thick moss covering them. We heard lots of birds, but we couldn’t spot them because everything up there was so thick and full of green life.
And an attempt to capture the canopy...it definitely doesn't do it justice, though:
We were going to call it quits for the day when we got to the second camp, but we got there around 3, and we figured we still had at least 3 hours of daylight, so we would either pass the time playing cards and looking for monkeys in the trees (a fruitless endeavor, unfortunately), or we could push on to the top and then come back to camp and just have to wake up and hike down the next day. We opted for option 2, and it was a good choice. The top was just another 1.5 hours, and it was all through cloud forest. The summit itself was mostly wooded, even though it was at about 9500 ft, so there was just one place where you could look out at the green mountains surrounding us. That little window was an incredible view, and it just felt good to finally have made it up the mountain that we spend most of our time at the base of.
At the sign...
And another of us (maybe a little to up-close):
Here's the view from where you could see out at the top. We were lucky that we got a view at all, since the top is often covered in clouds that cling to the mountain.
We headed back to the campsite, which turned out to be wayyyy better than the first campsite we ate lunch at, put up the tent, ate some leftover lentil soup out of peanut butter jars (we didn’t have the energy to make a fire or cook), and crawled into our sleeping bags around 7, just after dark. It was amazing up there, but a lot colder, too. We could see our breath, and it was a COLD night in the tent! I also woke up several times thinking that Aaron breathing was actually some kind of animal lurking around outside planning its attack on our tent.
Morning came, we made it back down in just a few hours, and then we showered, snacked, and napped for awhile. Sleeping in a tent in a freezing forest with jeans for a pillow makes you appreciate your own bed soooo much. We really enjoyed the whole experience, though…surprisingly, although it’s the main tourist attraction in Gracias (not that there are many), a lot of people that live here have never hiked to the top, but I wouldn’t miss it.
Our neighbors, on the other hand, who are guides in the park, go up there all the time, and say that they get slightly annoyed by the tourists because they have to stop and rest so much. Their family has been so generous and friendly toward us this whole time we’ve been here, though. They’ve taught me how to make pupusas, tamales (which is VERY labor-intensive, the way they do it down here), and I’m going to make tortillas with them sometime after school when I don’t completely wiped. I’m happy that Sonia, the woman that I mainly cook with and talk to, wants to learn how to make pizza, so we can at least have a little exchange going on.
We went over to their house for Paola’s birthday this weekend. Paola is in my class, and she’s one of the sweetest kids I have. She knows everybody’s business all the time, and calls me out on every contradiction I make, but she is always giving out stickers, lending her school supplies to friends (which is a big deal here), and her arm is probably really strong from being practically constantly raised in class. She comes over to my house a lot just to say hello, play around with sticks or chalk or her cousins, or to get homework help. She has a lot of friends at school, but they couldn’t really make it up to her house for the party, since it’s not too conveniently located to town, so the party was just her family and us. We had beef, beans, tortillas, and cake. There was a minor catastrophe when her little cousin locked herself in a bedroom, but another relative was able to crawl between the roof and the wall to unlock the door before she had even stopped being entertained by jumping on the bed and having people talk to her through the window. We played with the kids, sang Happy Birthday, and just hung out a little while. I hope it was a good birthday for Paola…I think it was; she’s easy to please, and she got 3 whole packs of new stickers.
At school, our classes are doing pretty well. Their English is coming along, and I’ve noticed some really great breakthrough moments with some of my struggling kids, lately. I’ve been able to switch up the help class roster, my lowest reader can now read multi-syllable words and identify most letter sounds (although short and long vowels are still tricky for everyone since they don’t have that in Spanish). One of my lowest kids at the beginning of the year is now one of my highest level kids, and has done a lot of fake dramatic fainting onto the floor lately upon receiving his test grades back. Not everything has been rosy, but things like that are really encouraging. Both of our classes have had a lot more drama and crying lately…I think they just need a few days off to play and recharge. Some of the girls in my class are getting into a boy-crush phase, too, which has upped the drama and gossip level lately, too. Today, a couple of them even gave letters to the 8th graders that they like, telling them up front that they are their “secret love.” A little out of their league, but they’re just having fun teasing each other and having secrets with their friends. Still, I don’t remember a lot of that going on when I was in third grade.
My class finished our animal unit awhile ago, and we made clay animals, shoebox habitats, and collected information about them for a classroom zoo. The kids had a lot of fun with that, and I wish that I had taken pictures. Aaron’s kids came to look at the exhibits and hear the presentations, and they did a good job keeping their more critical thoughts to themselves, except for one girl who tattled by saying: “Carlos say that Deyssi’s elephant looks like—como se dice (how do you say)—bleehhhh (with vomit sound and motion).” This week, we had a cricket jumping contest, and graphed the cricket jump distances vs. the jumps the kids did. They had so much fun running around and catching insects, and I loved helping them and just kicking back and exploring with them outside the classroom.
Aaron’s class has been busy, too. They’re studying birds right now, and he had them cut out life-size wings of different species, measure their own wingspans, and right now, they’ve been playing a migration game he made up. It involves two big cardboard dice, a big chalk map of the Americas, and the kids having to try to make the trip without losing members of their flock. Sounds a little reminiscent of Oregon Trail for birds, but without the wagon to caulk or Jimmy getting a snakebite.
Here's Marcos, one of Aaron's kids, in the nest he made. Both of our classes actually did this activity...pretty entertaining way to spend a Science class!
Tomorrow afternoon, some friends from Landmark will be in Gracias to visit for a week! This weekend, we’re going to the coast for some rafting and relaxing at the beach with them. It’s so great to have visitors to look forward to and spend time with! Hopefully, we’ll have better luck with the rental car this time. We’ll be better about taking pictures while people are here, so look forward to some good ones on the next post! If you read this, thanks…it means a lot to us.
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