Peru July 25

Woke up this morning with not too bad of sleep. Vaughn on the other hand slept awfully because he kept thinking the wind blowing the tent was cows trying to push it off the cliff. Our goal today was to pass through Choco and back over the bridge and make it a little ways up the road toward Cabanaconde. We made it back to Choco in about 1 ½ hours and sat for a couple minutes to relax. The plaza was pretty crowded and we heard over the intercom that today was the day they distributed shoes. The excitement of shoe day was rivaled by the reappearance of the two white people they saw the day before. We had our yogurt drinks, bought hour water and left. On our way to the bridge we passed about 20 people with mules, which slowed us down due to having to get off the path all the time. These mules would have been a lot more helpful if they had come a day or two earlier. We made it down to the bridge around 12:15 and were offered a ride up to Cabanaconde by the guys who we formally though were creepy. The ride though was not till 3:00, so we took a dip in the river and tanned. I soaked my lower half in the ice cold water for about 20 minutes to heal my newly aching knee and my blistered feet with toenails almost coming off. It felt amazing!! But let me tell you right now, the shrinkage that occurred in those 20 minutes would have made George Costanza feel like a champion. So after our only relaxation so far on the trip, we went up to the workers who offered the ride and conversed with them. This was round 2:45. When we got to them, they said it would be another 40 minutes so we sat and talked. Soon after, one of the workers offered to buy us beer and would not let us say no. So he gave us a bottle of Arequipina, the local Arequipan beer. It was warm and disgusting. While talking to them we found out that they had been drinking for the past 6 hours. Not only that, but one of them was a coke addict with more metal in his mouth than teeth, and had some fetish with taekwondo. The other, whose name we heard about 23 times (because he kept repeating everything over and over because of drunkenness), was named Jorge and attempted to name all of the 50 states about 14 times and only got more than 5 once. He kept naming Georgia, NY, FL, Washington and California. We also found out, in the middle of this deep heart to heart with these two drunk construction workers that didn’t speak English, that it was actually a priest coming from Choco whose car we were going to take, and non one knew exactly when he was gonna be there. Around 3:50 we were getting frustrated waiting for this ride that was seeming to never come, so we decided to get up and start hiking again. Right when we stood up, the priest appeared and we go our goodbye hugs and waves from Jorge and the unknown coke addict and were on our way up. The priest was very nice and it turned out he saw us when we walked through Choco earlier, and I remember I saw him as well. He was Argentinean and had lived in Brazil, Italy and now Cabanaconde. He goes to Choco once a month to do a sermon, and by some sort of Godsend, it happened to be his day today. It was about a 45 minute ride up the road to Cabanaconde and we picked up some local family hitchhikers in the back of the pick-up for the last 10 minutes. When we got to town we sat and people watched until 7:00 and then ate at a restaurant called Kunter Wassi. We got an amazingly delicious appetizer of avocado slices with lime juice, salt and pepper. Scrumptious!! For main courses I got this chicken with a crispy fried crust thingy and mashed taters and Vaughn got Al Paka Steak and cheese stuffed potatoes. Quite good. We now have to catch our 9:00 bus to Arequipa. If this is my last journal entry it means the bus got hijacked or we got robbed by the cab driver at 3:00 am in Arequipa. Adios!