Thursday 15 March 2012

This was the last day for Michael, who was off to San Miguel before flying back to the US Tuesday, although he hoped to be able to change it to Monday. Beau was joining Michael for his trip, which was hopefully going to include a canoe trip to the jungle (after my experience in the Amazon), so after breakfast, we said goodbye to them as Eva, Anya and myself would be off for good on Friday.

I elected to do my mula run (60 litres), and had almost an hour to get to the bottom (the milk and mula being ready earlier than usual). However, as if suspecting that it was my last time, the mula tried to play up a couple of times both descending and ascending and the stick had to be employed a number of times, not only to hurry it along but to dissuade it from feeding by the path.

Afterwards, I started packing in readiness for an early departure Friday. Whilst discarding some stuff into the very full drawers of donated clothes in the outer common room, I saw monkeys in the trees outside. I was able to quickly grab my camera and get a few shots off on my return. One (above), tried to intimidate me by baring his teeth but at least, a few of them stayed around long enough to get some shots. Later, they made their way to the trees in front of our room, but I was too busy jamming stuff into my backpack to care at that point!

The afternoon was spent planting paja toquilla plants - they're the same plants used to make panama hats - near Alexandra's house, with Sebastian. As there were only 10 plants (Gabriel and Beau had been unable to uproot enough of the large plants without killing them earlier in the week. Even Walter killed three demonstrating, from what I gather), we were finished in about 70 minutes, which meant a nice early shower and more time to continue packing. It also meant that I could finally discard my grotty work clothes as this is the last working day. Hooray!! The others ended up weeding the school vegetable garden, which is normally the province of the schoolchildren, however, it's the holidays (they're "lucky" enough to get holidays during the worst of the rainy season…) and they were due to return in two weeks.

Still no power but managed to read the medicinal plants book that Walter found for me the day before I left for the jungle trip, using my head torch, although we also had the candles lit, too.