20K and a Year Away

Seriously, she is going to pass out. Someone get her some water and a fainting couch for this one. She might need a little lie-down.

Let’s talk about our day today! The day started great. I was up earlier than anticipated and way earlier than my 7am alarm. We had breakfast scheduled at the restaurant, Dani’s, here at the hotel at 8am. We got our hiking gear on and got everything ready and headed over there at 8, only to see she had not arrived, yet. We went back to our room and packed our backpack and refilled our water bottles. We sat down and waited. We had scheduled a taxi to get us at 9am, so we had some time to spare. Remember, today was another waterfall hike – mud and jungle ahead.

She finally arrived and we went to eat at 8:30. It was omelets and what they call tortillas, which are fried corn cakes, not at all what we think of as tortillas. We picked out the green pepper, as one does, and ate our breakfast. I sent a message to the taxi guy and he said the taxi would be there in about 8 minutes. We finished and went back to the room to get ready to go. We had water and little, super-absorbent towels, snacks, money, bandaids, and a dry bag, just in case. The taxi arrived and we headed out.

While Axel was finishing his breakfast, I had a chat with the restaurant lady – whose name is Katherine. We talked about the restaurant schedule for Christmas week, I asked her to make a cake, and we set up a plan for Axel and her daughter, Daniela, to start working on English and Spanish together for school. Daniela is 11.

The cake I asked her to make was from Axel’s Christmas list. She is going to whip up a chocolate cake and get some ice cream for us for Christmas day. She also asked us to come to dinner at her house Christmas Eve and then said she was going to bring food down for Christmas day because she didn’t want us to be alone. What a nice person. That was so thoughtful. I told her she didn’t need to do all of that, but that we would love to spend the time with her family. She also told us we could use the freezer in the kitchen to store any ice cream. That is very helpful, considering we bought a tub of ice cream and I told Axel to eat the whole thing because we didn’t have anywhere to put it! HAHA! He hated that.

We did all this chatting in Spanish so Axel doesn’t know anything about the cake. Keep it a secret, please. He does know about the school stuff, though, because, of course. He is actually really trying to learn Spanish now that he has friends that don’t speak English. Should be a fast turnaround!

As you can tell, I am dragging this out a little so my mom will get bored and stop reading. Haha! The taxi just arrived and we jumped in and headed to the falls!

Now, if I haven’t mentioned it before, riding in a taxi here is kind of a leap of faith. There is a chance you could crash, but the likelyhood is small, considering the cars have no damage and there is no blood on the road. This is an adventure, though, so let’s do this!

We made it to the road to the falls in one piece, got out, and started the hike. It looked like solid ground, which was a bonus. We lived it up for about 5 minutes when the road turned to a mud pit and we spent some serious time choosing our next steps. We knew this was going to happen, so no big deal, just try to keep your shoes on. Don’t let the mud suck them off!

We were having a great time navigating our path, talking about all the stuff around us, and listening to the falls in the background. According to the sign, the falls were 1.5KM away. We kept following the posted directional signs and navigating steps. Several times, we had to backtrack to find a less muddy option. There were two kinds of mud this time, the usual orange clay and a dark black silty mud. Nice to see a little variety. Hahaha!

We came to a section of the trail that was more difficult, especially where it was wet. We carefully put our feet down and tested each step so we didn’t go flying back down the mud and rocks. Did I tell you how many times I fell last time? Yeah, we were being very careful. As we got closer and closer to the falls, the terrain changed from mud and vegetation to big rocks and tree roots. We had to cross over big rocks to find places to put our feet. It was a little more difficult, but still a good hike.

We finally could see the falls, and the path down to them. It was not an easy path and it was starting to get pretty slippery on these rocks. We slowly made our way down the huge boulders, holding on to whatever was nearby to make sure we had a solid step.

Axel was heading down the final boulder to the water and then, WHOOOSH, he went sliding!! It was scary to watch. He was on his backside in no time, then rolled over to try to get some traction and scraped his knee. I thought there was going to be a ton of blood and a huge patch of his skin on the rock, but it was so slick he only got a little scrape. It scared me a lot though! I think it scared him a lot, too! He did a quick body check and reported everything was fine. I slid down the boulder to take a look at his knee and rest at the bottom.

The falls were tremendous. It was loud and roaring and the top of the waterfall was way above where we could see. It was so amazing just to stand there and watch it pour down. Very cool.

This brings me to our little adventure. You probably thought the slip was the adventure… well, nope! Axel is doing fine. Nothing was hurt and the small scrape had already stopped bleeding. So, we set off to go back up. But… we can’t get up. We try and try to get a foothold and there is nothing. Our shoes are so slippery that we keep sliding back down. We scour the area and weigh all of our options. This is a little uncomfortable. Axel says, “Should we call someone.” I say, no, we will get up there, don’t worry. I start thinking through options. I test spots and change my mind several times. This is not quite how we thought this was going to work out. Oh well, it was early, we were fine, we had plenty of time to find a way up. And we had snacks! Whoo hoo!

Now, I will not lie. This was a bit of a challenge and it did make me stop and think. But, no time to worry about anything. We had things to do and places to go. The problem was our shoes on the slippery rocks. The solution was taking off our shoes and going up in our socks. Our socks had great traction on the rocks. No slipping and sliding. I went up first to make sure it was ok. I had to work my way up backward sitting down and going very slowly to make sure I didn’t slide right back down. When I got to the top, I had Axel toss me my shoes and his, found a stick I could use to pull him up, and had him make his way up. I picked a better, straightforward route for him and he made it up in two seconds. See! Not a problem at all!

We talked the whole way back about looking death in the face and laughing. Axel said, when he slid, he made it down then punched death in its face! HAHAHA! He talked a mile a minute the whole way. The little detour took only about 15 minutes, but in his mind, it was forever. We talked about not getting worried about the situation and looking for all possible solutions. I told him that was just a part of taking an adventure, you have to be ready for whatever can happen. This wasn’t so bad because we were near people, in a fairly safe area, had snacks, and were not hurt. We had a chance to look at our situation and find a way, use our problem-solving skills in a real-world situation.

Of course, I turned it into a school activity for him. Here is what he wrote:

On the hike today the mud swallowed our shoes. It made a lot of weird sounds like wet sucking. Our boots were so muddy that we had to wash them for about 20 minutes. I slid down a very slippery rock trying to get to the side of the cascades. I said (as a joke) “I faced death!”. I asked my mother if we needed to call someone (like 911 or something like that). I felt helpless because I thought that the rocks were too slippery to climb onto. My mom said that we should take off our boots so that we would have traction to climb up the rocks. And when we were waiting for the taxi I got bit by an ant, I am not sure what type of ant it was but the bite hurt. I think that it was a leaf-cutter ant.

This was far less descriptive than all the things he said on our walk back. I asked him to include some of those comments because they were hilarious, but he is not ready for that kind of sharing, yet. Such a funny kid. Maybe we should sign up for the Survivor show. Ha! Mom, what do you think?