Catching the Catch of the Day

July 17th

Mundug, Ecuador

Today, the skies were as clear as they’ve ever been for my entire stay here. When I first opened the door on my cabin this morning, I had that immediate feeling that it would be one of those kind of days. One in which the sun never disappears for more than 15 minutes behind the clouds and one that leaves you exhausted in a good way at the end of the day from the exposure to all of sun rays.

To update you on our trip planning status to Chimborazo, I decided to cancel for now. Let me explain. After further research, I found out that acclimatization is necessary to take on a mountain that high. My friend Dennis will still attempt the summit on Saturday with the help of a guide, but I personally didn’t feel like I was ready to take on that kind of altitude….yet. Equipment and a guide costs about $100 to climb and if you can’t make it to the top, it’s not their fault.

Knowing this, I spent a good hour thinking about how I wanted to spend the rest of my free time away from camp while I’m still here. We (several fellow climbing enthusiast on our staff) came up with a plan that may just work in order to get acclimated in about a week. Saturday, we hope to climb Chimborazo’s sister peak, Carihuayrazo (about 16,000 ft.) in preparation for maybe another attempt later next week after our return to Tena. Our preparation may also include a camping trip above the village of Puatug (where we’ve done mission work before) at about 12,000 ft.

As many of you probably know, I’m somewhat of a risk taker. Maybe it’s a crazy perspective, but I don’t want to sit around and wait for life to happen to me. On the same token though, while I like seeing, tasting, hearing, touching, and smelling the unbelievable sites of the world, I know my limits at the same time. For that reason, I’m holding off on Chimborazo until maybe next week or my next trip here to Ecuador.

Changing gears, the youth camp ended today around noon and there were many sleepy eyes to accompany it. Like most youth camps, the guys stayed up a little past 3am, which of course, meant not a lot of sleep for us counselors. It was such a pleasure to work with such talented and bright kids this week though. Many of them could carry on a conversation in English and were always wanting to know more of the language. Obviously, it was much different than kid’s camp last week where we constantly had to chaperone the kids. In addition, getting to listen to some of the speaker’s messages on the various topics that confront the Ecuadorian youth was refreshing and helped remind me of what the Bible says about certain things.

After camp ended, Chacauco seemed to become somewhat of a ghost town again. Alex, one of the translators here left today to take a job at a church in Tennessee (close to the Memphis area) for the next year. It’ll be here second long stay in the states and everyone here was a little sad to see her leave for such a long time. The kids went back to their respective villages and we, the staff, were left with an open afternoon.

Of course we choose to go somewhere neat and different, so we elected to go to the Mundug Waterfalls where Ricardo had taken me just the past weekend. Getting to be a tour guide sure is a lot of fun and we had a great hike to the freezing cold falls. As mentioned early, the skies were so clear that you could see for miles on end. At the altitude we were hiking at to Mundug, we could see both the tops of Chimborazo and Carihuayrazo just as clear as day. Hidden by the mountains surrounding camp, the mountains are only about twenty kilometers away linearly, but taking all the roads to get to them ends up taking about two hours. With the sun beaming down on us, we hiked through the mud on the side of the mountain with a magnificent view of the surrounding valley. On the way back, we caught two Trucha (trout) at a farm [paid for them of course] to take back to the camp to fry. Trucha are expensive (comparatively) here in Ecuador, about $3.25 for two large fish, but boy are they tasty. Roberto, our chef extraordinaire, showed me how to de-scale, gut, batter, and fry the Truchas tonight to end another day at the camp.