Arachnophobia and Waterfalls

Melody taught her class this morning, and it went well.  I could go into more detail, but I can't write very much about painting fingernails cause I'm a guy.

At noon, Ken came over and we were supposed to grab lunch quickly and head out to some waterfalls in the middle of the jungle a couple of hours away.  Well, first we had to give Ruddy some money to buy us some tickets to the soccer game tomorrow night, then we had to pick up Roberto from work, and then we had to go back to Ruddy to give him more money because they had upped the ticket prices since last season.  To keep it brief, we ended up hitting Burger King (the only fast food joint here), and eating on the road at 2:00.

The road to the waterfalls is the same road that goes out to El Camino, but instead of continuing on that far, you ironically turn at the exact spot where Logan split his head open a few weeks ago.  Keep on going until you get to the river, drive THROUGH the river, then you get on what they call a road in Bolivia.  Basically, it consists of a series of large rocks, mud pits, mostly dry creek beds and pot holes.  It had rained earlier this week, so anywhere that was shady, was foot deep mud and anywhere sunny, was foot deep dried ruts.

The road was entertaining enough, but this time of year in the jungle is also giant spider time apparently.  All along the side of the road every 10 feet are huge 5 to 10 foot wide spiderwebs with very large scary spiders on them.  We stopped and took a bunch of pictures which I will upload tomorrow when I get my camera back from Ken.  He borrowed it to take passport pictures for his boys because he is trying to bring them to Canada later this year.  Anyways, these webs are the kind that you see on Discovery Channel or Nature Channel.  They are very impressive, especially in the sunlight, and are much stronger than the little webs we have at home.  I poked at one with a stick and really wasn't able to break it without swinging the stick at it.  Then I ran back into the truck when the spider started running from the middle of its web to where I was whacking.

We continued on the road for the next hour or so and we all took turns whacking our heads on the windows as we hit the big bumps.  I took the worst knock while I tried to take a video of us going through a really bad section of mud when the truck slid into a really deep rut and I smacked my head on the outside of the front window.  The kids thought it was hilarious however until they smacked their heads on the windows too.

We finally arrived at the entrance to the waterfalls where they have some bbq and camping sites and everyone had to go to the bathroom.  Of course, as is the tradition in Bolivia, the bathroom will cost you 1 Boliviano, and only after paying, do you get some toilet paper.  If you need more, you pay again.

From the parking area, its a bit of a walk down a jungle path to the start of the waterfalls.  The only problem was that over the path, are the same huge spiderwebs with the same huge spiders.  Not just one or two, but 40 or 50 of them.  Lets all take a moment to flashback to the single large spider in our house and Melody's reaction to that.  Now lets all picture that reaction times 50.  We eventually got her to go down the path and we got to the waterfalls and started the long path up to the top.  It was frequently slippery, but thanks to firm grips on the childrens' hands, nobody was injured other than some dirty clothes.  Several places along the climb, there are pools of water that are deep enough to jump into, and there were adventurous people doing so all the way up.  Lukas wanted to walk over by one, and proceeded to slip and slide about 5 feet down the falls before he got his footing back.

We kept on going and eventually reached the top with the biggest of the waterfalls and a nice pool at the bottom.  The kids splashed around a bit, and Ken showed the path up the cliff to jump into the pool at the bottom of  the falls.  Lukas wanted to climb all the way up, but we stopped him half ways where it got a little steep and slippery.  Ken went all the way up and after some prodding, jumped the 20 feet or so into the pool.  I have a nice video of it that would take about 3 days to upload, so it will have to wait until we get back to Canada.  By the time we got back to the city, it was 8:00 so we just grabbed some food at a restaurant and went home.

It was a good day, and we are all really looking forward to finally seeing a professional soccer game tomorrow after our visits to some more of Melody's students houses in the afternoon.  The family is split on who to cheer for because it is a Classico game tomorrow which has the two Santa Cruz teams playing each other.  Logan and Jordan are cheering for Oriente and the rest of us are cheering for Blooming.  No matter who wins, there will be fireworks a plenty. (no, really they regularly shoot off fireworks in the stands at soccer games here)