Day 3: vamos a la playa

On our third day we awoke to sun. I actually didn´t think this would be physically possible considering all the rain we heard the night before. At breakfast I found out that a few of our group members actually heard nearby landslides the night before.

We had a shorter day of hiking ahead of us: 5 hours to our lunch spot at which we would hang out all afternoon and camp. The hike started out a bit precarious as we were dodging landslides and walking through rivers, waterfalls and massive amounts of mud. The sun stayed out for most of the time, which provided for some much needed relief for our poor little rain ponchos.

We made a pit stop at a couple little homes that doubled as snack bars for trekkers and I somehow spent 9 soles on a gatorade (that´s like $4.00). clearly the altitude had messed with my normally stingy self.

We arrived at our third campsite "la playa," which is Spanish for the beach. This was ironic because we were no where near a beach, rather a rapidly flowing river that perhaps the locals equated with a beach? We had actually beaten the porters and horses to the campsite because they likely had some trouble getting the horses past all the landslides.

We had lunch and had some time to rest and play games. I was completely exhausted from having three days of hardly any normal digestion so I took a little nap in our tent. Before dinnner we got the chance to rinse off in freezing cold water. It hurt like hell but it felt better than the grimy feeling my body had been in for the past 80 hours!

After dinner Julie, Jessica and I took it upon us to teach some of our fellow campers how to play bananagrams. It was a ton of fun and we actually had some pretty stiff competition from a british attorney. We used Clarie´s special rules to make the game more difficult even!

Before bed, our guide, Eddie, told us that the trail up to the mountain we were to summit the next day was in pretty good shape despite all the rain and that we would continue with our plan to start our ascent at 7 am. Julie, Jessica and I were excited but some of the Austrailian girls (who wore tennis shoes that were not at all waterproof) were not so happy. We all snuggled into our tents and our two guides stayed up drinking with some locals until 4 am. Sucks to be them at our 6 am wake up call the next morning!! More on that later...