Saturday morning I went for a hike with Aldo, Faviola, Jon
Paul and Paula. There are some prehistoric cave paintings in the mountains just
behind the house, so they took me to see them. The walk was beautiful and the
view, or course, was spectacular. There wasn’t too much wildlife to look at
along the way, but I did get the chance to confirm that tarantulas do in fact
live in the mountains here. This one was about 5 or 6 inches long and roughly
the color of the sand. How close to you think I was before I realized it was a
spider? :-P
The cave is pretty interesting.
Sadly it hasn’t been taken care of very well, so now mostly what you see is
graffiti of people’s names. We were able to pick out pieces of a few of the
actual paintings though. According to my host brother, this cave is the oldest
pre-historic cave paintings in South America. I’m going to do some research on
that though and get back to you. We left the cave and hiked down to another
town on the main road. It was about 3 hours all the way around. In Tingua we
went to a livestock…farm? Not exactly sure what to call it. They raise
livestock to sell, but it’s also a research center for the university in
Huaraz. We went to look at the animals though and I blew everyone’s mind when I
explained that not only had I seen cows before, but that my very own grandfather
had raised them :-P My host brother asked me to explain myself about four times
before he finally believed me. I guess they think we’re all from the city….who
knows? We caught a combi back to Mancos and I spent most of the rest of the day
copying school statistics into excel. Not everything in the Peace Corps is
worth writing home about…..except that I just did.
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