Día de las Montañas

A couple days ago, on the first, my cousin and I went hiking in the mountains that surround San Isidro. I tried to get more people to come with me by telling them that the first of February is a special day in the States: “El Día de las Montañas.” Nobody believed me, and rightly so. Dario and I packed a lunch and started at seven so we wouldn’t be out in the sun during the hottest part of the day. We had planned on going to the highest mountain to take pictures and come back but once we were up there, we decided we might as well visit as many other peaks as we could and we ended up staying out almost the entire day. Amazingly, I didn’t get a sunburn because the Peace Corps gave me this really thick SPF 60 sunscreen; you only need one coat of that stuff for the entire day, even at the beach. We started at his house on the edge of town and walked back into the center where a road splits off and goes up in the mountains. It was asphalt for a couple hundred meters and then it was dirt and rock the rest of the way. The hardest part of the entire day was the initial ascent; after that we just followed the ridgeline from peak to peak.

We came across a random soccer field way up in the mountains that they use for church retreats and family reunions and stuff. It was really nice, but it definitely seemed out of place and I still can’t imagine the people here hiking up there. I’ve never seen anyone walking around for the fun of it and everyone thinks I’m weird for walking, jogging and hiking. About the only form of exercise that people engage in here is soccer. A little higher up the mountain, we found some bee farms or whatever you call them. Not far from there we also saw a bunch of bees living inside of dead trees. My cousin was afraid of them at first, but I explained to him that they won’t mess with you as long as you don’t mess with them. Eventually, we had to leave the dirt roads to get to the top of the first mountain and we didn’t use another road until we came back down at the end of the day.

The tops of the mountains here are great places to take pictures from because they’ve cut down all the trees to provide grazing land for the cows. We visited several peaks and had different views from each one, but in every direction you look there’s always many more mountains one after the other. We must be right in the middle of a range here in San Isidro. I got a ton of great pictures of my town and the surrounding areas. From the northeast mountain, you can see another one of the villages I’m supposed to work in at some point in these two years: Llano Bonito. I think that translates to ‘Pretty Plain’ but it’s a joke here because it’s neither pretty nor flat. It’s basically strung out along a ridge and the people here say that even the soccer field isn’t level, haha. From another you can see this huge facility owned by the electric company that’s run by the government. And from the last one, the southeast one, you can see almost the entire Los Santos region, or at least all the parts that I’ve ever been to or heard anything about. The only major town I couldn’t see was Santa Maria because there’s a mountain in between it and San Marcos that blocks the view. So I couldn’t see where Bryson and Sarah live, but I could see Copey, almost at the top of the mountain at the far side of the valley where Angela and Rebecca live, San Lorenzo, where Kelsey lives, San Marcos, the biggest town in Los Santos, San Pablo, the closest big town to me, and a handful of other smaller villages.

It’s really cool to be able to see where you live from high up like that. I could see all the parts of town that I’m familiar with and now I know of other parts that I still need to visit. All the major buildings are really noticeable from up there: the church, the soccer field, the salon comunal, the salon pastoral, the two-story house (there’s seriously only one here haha), the cemetery, etc. The salon comunal is a public building that the community uses for dances, concerts, parties and other gatherings. The salon pastoral is owned by the church and is used for similar church-related activities. The two-story house in town is actually my uncle’s house and we live right next door, so it was easy to find where I live from up there!

I was surprised that we didn’t see any snakes, but we did see a very small frog, lots of grasshoppers, butterflies, some lizards, cows, bees, hummingbirds, and a pack of what looked to me like raccoons or something very similar. Their tails were up in the air though… My cousin said that they’re called ‘ardillas’ in Spanish, but that means squirrels so I still don’t know what we saw and I didn’t get a picture either. There was this one part where the face of the mountain was completely covered in a really thick grass and there must have been several hundred birds flying back and forth. I’m assuming they were eating the insects that live up there, but it was National Geographic type stuff with that many of them zooming back and forth feasting on their prey. All we needed was a guide with a British accent to make it complete! It did seem more like terrain you would find in England though. Not that I’ve ever been, but it was like rocky highlands with grass up to your knees.

Towards the end of the day, we came across a herd of cows blocking our way to the next peak. They saw us from a mile away and just stared at us the entire time we carefully made our way around them further up the side of the hill. I would have never thought about it in a million years, but my cousin had to take his shirt off to go around them because he was wearing red! He also advised me to go above them instead of below because if they decided to chase us, they would never catch us going uphill, but downhill is another story… Later that day, I realized that I hadn’t been stared at like that since I came back from Korea!

On the way back down, we kind’ve got lost. We knew the direction we needed to go (down), but the roads weave in and out of coffee farms and sometimes end abruptly. We followed a road for a good while and out of nowhere we turned a corner and there was nothing but coffee in front of us and on all sides. Instead of backtracking uphill, we figured as long as we kept descending we would get to where we wanted to go. Eventually we hit a creek and followed it down until we found another road. From there it was fairly easy to find our way back to town, but those roads in the coffee mountains are seriously like a maze.

All in all, it was a really fun day and I’m already planning my next adventure. I want to walk from San Isidro to Frailes. My brother knows the way and he said it’s like eight or nine hours, which is about the same amount of time we spent the other day. And who knows, maybe there will be a Día de las Montañas Parte Dos!