Working out in Paradise

To get a better picture of my day to day life here let me describe my walk to you this morning (nothing out of the normal happened) I have been walking for over an hour every morning and I’m loving it:

I put on bugspray because I have been getting bit quite a bit and someone in my town just got leishmaniasis (and I do NOT want to get that) or BOT fly! I go outside to put on my sneakers because they are covered in red mud from my previous walks.

I leave a little late this morning (6:30 AM) and this means that I sweat significantly more; it is incredible what half hour will mean to the heat.

Regardless of the path I take I will have some steep up and down hills on the walk. I pass a dozen houses, three motorcycles, a car, a couple horses and I wave and say hi to everyone (yeah, I’m the weird waving gringa walking for fun!) Oh, and how could I forget, I pass many many cows and horses, but I haven’t started waving at them yet.

My favorite plants are these tiny ferns (about the size of my finger) that recede and bunch up when you touch them. One of my volunteer friends calls them the ‘groovy ferns’ though they are really called Dormilonas by people here.

On the return of my walk I was stopped by this machete wielding man telling me that I couldn’t go by because there were some mad bees. They were cutting branches and had upset a bee hive. After waiting ten minutes, I was told I could go by if I sprinted as fast as I could on the far side of the path. Talk about motivation to run fast!

I’ve also gotten pretty good at the ‘bend down and pick up a rock’ technique against dogs. Dogs are much scarier here because they are simply on the street and getting bit is not that uncommon.

Once home, the cold shower actually feels good.


PS. As an aside, I spent 30 minutes last night fascinatedly watching these ants eat/take apart this dead bug on my floor. They are intense!