A Sunday Hike

On Sunday of this past weekend Liz and I decided we wanted to do something active; partly to get a break from Matana, partly to burn off all the Manba we'd eaten Saturday, and partly just because we have been wanting to explore the mountains and river that we live next to.  We go running a few times a week and we always go up the gravel road from Matana into the mountains, so we are familiar with that route, but we really wanted to find some new terrain to explore this time, so we decided we would walk through Raypool (one of our CHI and Gadyen Dlo communities) and then find a way down into the river bed from there.  

Following the river - the view upstream

We thought we would just hike through the river - it's never any deeper than 2 ft, and most if it is less than half a foot with lots of rocky areas not even submerged.  We originally wanted to walk upstream in the river bed as far as we could and try to find the starting source of the water.  However, as it turned out, Sunday was laundry day for many families in the area, so walking along the river bed made us feel like we were invading on people's privacy a little bit (as many of the women were washing themselves, and their kids, along with the clothes).  At one point after we made it past several large banana farms which bordered the river on both sides, we found a path that went straight up one of the foothills next to the river.  In the picture below, the path we ended up taking is right where Liz's head is.

Following the river, the view downstream

This turned out to be a really good turn for us to take in our hike because we got to actually do some intense climbing, but also because the views we got from the top of these little mountains were breathtaking.  And, we didn't pass another person after we got out of the river area, which made the whole thing more relaxing, peaceful, and gave us just the kind of break we needed from constantly being stared at and called out to ("blan, BLAN, BLAN!").

View from our first peak: banana fields and the ocean

 Up on the first peak overlooking the banana fields

After making it to the first peak we had challenged ourselves to, my stubborn adventurer side came out (and probably the endorphins kicked in at this point) and I couldn't stop saying "let's just make it to the top of that next peak, we've got to see what's on the other side!"  And for most of it, Liz was right there with me in full agreement, however when we started losing sight of an actual path, and finding we had to fight with more and more thorn bushes to continue, she suggested we call it a day and head back.  Unfortunately, having set my sights on making it to this final peak, the highest mountain we could reasonably get too, I just couldn't turn back without having gotten to the top.  I'm really lucky Liz is such a good sport and pushed through with me, although I knew she was (understandably) cursing me in her head.  The worst part was about a 15 minute span less than 100 meters from the top, where we literally were surrounded by several variations of thorn bushes in all directions.  We experimented with different methods to get through them, including trying to crawl underneath them, use our backpack as a shield, and trying to step down on top of them.  Eventually we made it through and to the summit - but we both definitely looked like we had gotten in a fight with a cat (and lost).

 Liz at our summit - view of the ocean, all of our CHI communities, the river, and lots of banana fields 

 The view at our summit behind us towards more mountains

Our relief of making it to the summit was slightly overshadowed by our fear for the way down for two reasons.  First, Liz and I both have bad knees; she's had several surgeries, and I've had knee problems since I was 12 and had Osgood-Schlatter's disease - and we both have the most pain and feel like our knees are weakest when we go down steep slopes.  Second, since we had made it to the top with no path, just bushwhacking the through the thorns, we were terrified we'd have to do the same thing back down.  Amazingly though, Liz was able to navigate us down the mountain finding a dried up stream bed that eventually lead us to a real trail.  In total our decent back down to the river took no more than 40 minutes.   

 Resting on some rocks in the river after getting back down the mountain to the river - still about a 45 minute walk home from here and we were just about out of water to drink.

We ran out of water shortly after making it all the way down, and decided that a stop by the coke lady for bags of water and some cokes would be the perfect end of hike reward.  When we sat down next to the the grandmother (that must own or co-own this "store" with her daughter), she couldn't stop exclaiming about how red we looked from the sun, and kept telling us that we should go to the market and get big straw hats to protect our face, chest and shoulders.  She speaks no English, but this was pretty easy to understand through hand gestures and her exclamations of "rouge, rouge!" (red, red!).  

After that we headed back to Matana, where reality started setting back in.  The day before, our water tank -  the tank that supplies our bathrooms with flush-able toilets and showers - had run out of water.  I feel kind of silly for even acting like this was such a big hardship, considering that most of the families we work with around here have never lived in a home with running water, and are always going to the river and canal with buckets to get water for their homes. (I mean, this is what I'm here studying!) But as hot, sweaty, sun-burned, and saturated with bug spray as we were... Liz and I made the difficult decision - one I can't believe I'm actually going to include in my blog - to take a quick dip in the canal. We didn't want to cause a scene, so we tried to find somewhere close to Matana but out of sight of other people, and eventually had to settle on a shallow, narrow little irrigation canal for the banana fields down the hill in front of the mission.  For as long as we debated whether we should or shouldn't go through with it, the few seconds of bliss that came from finally going through with it was totally worth it.  Ironically, we found out later that evening that Guilene and the girls had manually filled our tank with enough water from buckets that we could flush our toilets again, and take a 30 second shower, so in the end we didn't even really have to worry about all the coliforms we'd just been exposed to in the canal.

Desperate times call for desperate measures