Cajas National Park...Today was full of activity. Got up early as usual (about 5:45) to shower, dressed, get packed, and meet up with my group to go hiking at Cajas National Park. Cajas is a giant park that has some of the strangest vegetation I have ever seen in my life. The whole place is like a giant sponge; the grass is very bouncy and it absorbs water to send it through underground rivers that connect from lagoon to lagoon. It turns out that Cajas supplies something like 95 percent of the water for Cuenca and surrounding areas. The water there was strangely fresh and abundant.
The hike was about 3-4 hours and we only traveled about 7 miles or so if I had to guess. We stopped pretty frequently to listen to our tour guide Adrían (who was probably the nicest guy I have met thus far on our trip) and also we stopped to eat lunch in a cave in the middle of the forest (bosque) in Cajas. The bosque (forest) was one of the weirdest places I have ever seen. Suddenly, all of our surroundings transformed into this weird foggy ecosystem that resembled that planet where Yoda from Star Wars lives. The place was really unreal, especially in the rain as the fog was lifting out of everywhere. Another really strange thing to experience was seeing random Incan ruins scattered about during out hiking route. We would be walking by a stream and then suddenly see Incan stones. Really put things into perspective.
By the time I had gotten home, I was physically exhausted, cold and wet. Today though it was my eldest host-sister Johanna's birthday (she turned 30 years old!). A lot of my extended-host family was there and we spent a lot of time together. I probably got home at around 4:00PM and I wasn't able to get to my homework until about 10:00PM. When I had gotten home from Cajas, I played Johanna a song that I had written for her that went like this:
Feliz cumpleaños Johanna
Feliz cumpleaños a ti
Sobre el próximo año
Espero que seas feliz
(Happy Birthday Johanna
Happy Birthday to you
Over the next year
I hope that you be very happy)
The lyrics are pretty basic. I guess the melody adds a lot to the otherwise stale lyrics. I think that my sister really liked it, although me playing the song in front of all of the family sort of set a trap for myself -- we spent the next five hours listening to a lot of Latin music that the family wanted me to learn. Actually, this was all very good (instead of bad) but during the whole time I was thinking how I ought to be working on homework instead of listening to music. All in all, it was actually a really great experience and I am glad that I just soaked it all in.
