Introductions and Prickly Things

The internet is painfully slow here, so I will post some pictures next time. I tried earlier today, but it was going to take more than 45 min to post 5 pictures. I gave up.

In other news, the food here is actually quite delicious. The meals are very hearty, i.e. consisting of grains (pasta, beans, rice, potato), protein (almost always lamb), and juice. So far I´ve been pleasantly surprised, much better than the rice and beans that most Central Americans eat, but we´ll see what happens when we go out into the field tomorrow. Mack and Justin have said that the food is good, though poorly spaced out during the day (breakfast at 830, lunch at 1230, dinner at 730, at least at the base camp).

The base camp itself consists of probably about 10 houses, plus a couple larger buildings such as the Thompkins´ house overlooking part of the valley, a yet-to-be-finished visitors center, a gymnasium that has very old pool, foosball, and ping-pong tables, and a lodge for guests (except only ones that have donated over $1 million to the park, so that makes for a small group).

My spanish is slowly improving, though it takes a good deal of effort to think through spanish phrases, hopefully they´ll come to me a bit more easily in the next few weeks. It´s really nice to be one of the only gringos that can speak to the small Spanish speaking population at the camp.

Mack and Justin are doing well. Mack went out this afternoon for a three hour or so horse ride around the valley while Justin and I checked email, worked on blogs, and want for a short hike. Unfortunately, the hike took a turn for the worst when we realized we were in the middle of a swamp, though we quickly got out and hiked along a ridge with a nicer view. This morning, a larger group of us went out to a small lake to the east where we were hoping to see flamingos, but we hadn´t realized that we needed to go the far side of the lake to see them -- next time.

Things here are really prickly. The most ubiquitous animal by far is the guanaco (a cute deer relative, pictures are coming), and I assume the grasses and other plants here have evolved such that they deter any potential herbivores. Justin, Mack, and I went on a decently long hike yesterday, and up at the higher elevations, we encountered a lot of prickly hitchhiker type seeds that got all over my pants and keenes (naturally, they forgot to tell me that these seeds might be a problem). We didn´t quite make it to the top of this very high ridge, but apparently there isn´t much of a view in the other direction because there are simply another set of mountains to hike up.

Be back in a week! Hopefully without too much ¨sabor¨ -- see either of the other two blogs.