I'M ALIVE!!!

I know there's something wrong with me, because when I thought of this thread title, I got the song of the same name stuck in my head from the classic horrible 80's Olivia Newton John movie Xanadu, lol.

With that out of the way, yes, I am still alive after hiking The Lares Trek! It was a blast, and pretty challenging for what is described as a "mediocre" challenge. I had some hardships along the way, like a snow blizzard that had me up to my ankles in snow for a couple hours on the second day. On the same day, we also had to cross a tree trunk log "bridge" due to the water in the river being too high to go over on rocks. A couple steps onto this wet tree trunk, I slipped and fell over sideways. Luckily I caught my legs around the tree trunk and was holding myself completely horizontal for about a minute until our tour guide Fredy got to me and pulled me up. It felt like a scene out of an action movie where someone is reaching over a cliff going "GRAB MY HAND!"

After two challenging days of hiking in the rain and snow, the last morning we woke up to the most beautiful sunny day:

The weather was so great that we ate breakfast outside:

Our cooks made us pancakes:
There's so much more to say, but I'm tired and feel like wrapping this up for the time being. If you're lucky, in the future you'll be able to read about more klutzy things I did after we finished the actual trek like falling into one of those street side sewer/waterways and trying to grab a bottle of water off of a shelf at a market only to have two full shelves of drinks collapse onto me. I was humiliated, but luckily the store owners thought it was hysterical.

3 more hours until we can actually check in here at the airport (I'm at a Starbucks in the Lima airport at the moment), and 7 more hours until our flight back to Miami. Then another 5 hour layover until my flight back home to Indy!

Until next time,

Ryan