December 7th, 2011

DAY 20

 

 

 

 


I had a dream that I was visiting friends in Wilmington, NC and someone called wanting me to stop by their house. On the way over I got hit by a car on my left knee.

My knee does not like these steep climbs with the weight. I will go shorter distances per day and I may toss some clothes and any other unnecessary weight. If the less weight and shorter distances does not help I may have to reconsider what I'm doing. Not good or bad, just is. If one thing isn't working I'll try something different.

I walked into town, went into a restaurant and did my best at ordering a café, café is the name for coffee here. I walked around observing people and this interesting town. I could not talk to anyone and at times I wanted to but this little phrase book just does not work for a conversation. It only works to ask very simple, straightforward questions and then I can never understand the responses.


The gigantic tree in Gigante


I see a lot of horses pulling carts, 1 horsepower!


This is the hotel where I am staying

 

 

 

By lunchtime I was not very hungry but went to a little pastry shop and had a cafe' and a couple of pastries. Then as I was walking past another shop I saw some delicious looking fruit drinks so I had to try one. Again it was a big effort to figure out how to order. So far every time I order something, I always get served first and then pay after I am done. When I pay, the numbers are difficult to translate and I just hand over too much money and let them sort it out. They always take their time to try to teach me what the cost was, how to pay for it and carefully count my change back to me.

I walked around a lot today and my knees were perfect, no pain, no problem, they are only bothered by cycling up steep hills with that weight.


I I could not keep walking past this place! They made this all from fresh fruit on the spot, I saw them cut up the fruit just for this.

Going into their version of the post office I discovered they cannot ship anything to the U.S., this took about 15 minutes of searching for words and phrases in my phrase book. Still did not work and I wrote down, "can you mail to the United States" and they used google translate on their computer. She said I need to go to Garzon to ship something to the U.S.

In the late afternoon, I started looking at all my stuff. During the North America trip I took too little trying to be ultralight. Realizing how easy it was to cycle with weight I bought more clothes and stuff along the way increasing my weight. This time I have too much stuff. I can always wash clothes in the shower with me and keep wearing them over and over. If I need to, I can buy something temporary to wear if I stay somewhere longer and I don't want to keep wearing the same two shirts. So I will either ship some stuff back or just toss it.

Later in the evening I went for another walk and had some dinner, typical dinner cost 5 thousand pesos, which is about $2.50.


some sort of strange blur or glare appeared on this photo above the church

 


My dinner, no fried fish looking up at me tonight

After dinner the awful downpour started, when it rains here it is worse than any Oregon rain I ever experienced, it will come down extremely hard and fast. I ran back to the hotel and started going through my gear and packing to leave tomorrow morning. I got a knock at the door and it was John, we had some difficulty communicating until we got the google translate site up on my laptop. He wants me to meet someone named Vanessa tomorrow and the rest got lost in the translation. I think it must be something to do with showing me more of this area. I decided I would stay one more day and see what happens.

 

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