Chad and Michelle have friends down from the USA and we went with them and the Willis Family on a day trip to the Cajas National Park. Guillemo or ¨G¨as he is called affectionately by the gringos has a taxi van so we set off with him just after 8 am. The Cajas National Park has around 200 lakes and countless streams so we were in for an interesting day.
We got to the entrance and the guards wanted to charge us $10 per person (stardard price for Gringos but natives get in for $1.50 - how fair is that?) Usually that price would hire us a guide for the day but none was working so G said he knew of a better place to go as without a guide we could get lost! When we got to that checkpoint - discussion insued about price again but they were much more reasonable after we showed them our Censo´s to prove we lived in Cuenca. (The censo is a local id card that you must carry with you - we got ours last week before the 30 days of being in the country were up. That´s the law and if we had not got one we would be fined $200 per day until we got it).
The walk around the lake was beautiful and I had to pinch myself every so often to realize we were looking at the Andes!
Mark and Chad decided to be Alpaca herders and we all got a close up view of the Alpacas. Fascinating!
We then went up to a lookout point and viewed Cuenca from a good vantage point. Up on that hill there is a big church (how unusual) and G told me that the Brothers had started to build the assembly hall up there but the priest of the church had kicked up a fuss and the project was stopped as they had to find another spot.
Well now they have an assembly hall and the original land is eroding and slipping so they are far better off. The priest really did the witnesses a favour. Who was behind that I wonder?
5 comments:
Were those alpacas out in the wild. Sounds like you had a great day out with geat friends I look forwrd to meeting them someday
Cool - alpacas!!
Well they were in the wild but they did have ear tags on them so they belonged to someone. It was still awesome seeing them.
Hope you are still making plans to come visit - you too Marisa
You could have popped out to the Pickerings to see Alpacas and then popped to Mt to view Mauo! Ok so the mt isn't like the Andes and we don't have an assembly hall too close to here...... but glad to hear you have had a chance to see some of country side - take in all the views now coz when you get visitors you will need to know where to take them! Mum says we enjoy visiting the blog site. Keep it up.
Muchias Gracias mi mama - hopefully have something interesting to write soon.
xxx su hija
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