Ziplining and Line-Crossing

Soooo sorry about the late post! The day got away from us yesterday - and here´s how:

Up at the crack of 8:30 for breakfast, and by 9:30 we were on our way to do the ziplining. It was a hike of about a mile and a half to two miles, and a few people had some trouble. We´re not at altitude anymore, but the change can still be rough. But we all made it up the long, muddy road (no off-road trails, but the boots were necessary). When we arrived, 22 of the 27 decided to zipline.

The facility is very, very professional. Clean, well-maintained, and drop-dead gorgeous. Ziplining is astonishingly safe-feeling - the cable feels rock steady, if a bit bouncy (contradictory, I know, but true), and you zoom along at ridiculous speeds while the canyon careens beneath you. Still, you have a lot of control - you pull down on this reinforced glove, and by golly, down you slow. The whole group was thrilled with the experience, and plum tuckered by the time we got back to the hotel.

We set the kids free until 6:45, when we were going to take them to a karaoke place we had agreed to rent for an hour. But the carnaval thing, as it happens, becomes much more intense on Fat Tuesday, and a couple of people had somewhat bad experiences with the water-throwing - which had devolved to flour-throwing (it sticks in your hair when it´s wet, you see) and mud-throwing and even, on one particularly bad occasion, grabbing and carrying of people to the water for a soaking. It happened to Natalie, who was furious, and Megan, who took it in stride. Both reactions are completely legitimate. I hadn´t foreseen the escalation of things, and once I heard about that, I looked at the town with a somewhat more jaundiced eye, and agreed with the other chaperones that people in town were getting drunker and drunker, and more and more out of control, so we would not be going out any more that night.

The kids took the news in stride, and weren´t too upset about it - probably because we finally settled in around a looooong table in the hotel´s common area to tally up the points from the scavenger hunt. Once every group´s total was determined, I broke any possible ties (I didn´t know the current totals) by listening as one person from each group told the best story from the day. I awarded points based on this formula: Half the percentage of the story that I think they´ll still be telling in 20 years. There was one about chasing a TV cameraman down the street, another about sweet-talking an Indian woman into letting the kids hold her baby, only to then be asked to become the baby´s godmother, and being mocked and teased mercilessly in front of hundreds of people by street comedians. Once the points were awarded, the totals were tallied and the prizes unveiled. I´ll let the winners (or the non-winners) tell you what they were, but I will give you this hint: They were brilliant.

Off to the pizza joint for a communal dinner (it´s so close by as to be out of range of drunken revelers), and then we settled in to stand guard at the door in case anybody got the wild hare to venture downtown by themselves. ¨Downtown¨- The place has one street.) But nobody did. Even so, by the time I slapped my forehead and said ¨¨Dóh! The blog!!¨, everything was closed. And I mean everything.

Beddy-by, and up this morning for bird watching...but you´ll get that story later on. Our bus leaves in 20 minutes, and we´re squaring away el dinero. Until soon!!!