Day 7: Friday, April 11th, 2008 (Walk With Me - Dispatch)

7:23am – We just woke up in our “room” in Sorata. We can hear a waterfall or running water. I slept for eight hours straight without waking up. I feel refreshed!

9:36am – Just ate a tasty breakfast of pancakes, bread with butter and jelly, OJ and coffee. The Altai Oasis grounds are pretty amazing. We checked out the bridge to Sorata. It will be better to walk than taxi. Going to shave now and get ready to check out the town.

Before we left, we did some laundry by washing our socks in this sink outside.

We decided we were going to rent some bikes and ride to this cave, but when we got into town we discovered it was actually in the direction on the other side of our hostel, so we headed back to our hostel and left from there.

6:39pm – Ranz and I both shaved (well, trimmed) earlier. We hiked across the bridge into town (Sorata). We walked around the square and sat on a bench. We found a place for lunch called the Spider Bar. I had a traditional Bolivian dish called Pique Macho.

It had meat, sausage, hot dog bits, peppers, onions, eggs, cheese, fries, and a sauce. It was tasty.

We bought some apples off the street (4 for 10Bs). We then hiked back to our resort and changed clothes.

We headed down the road from our hotel around 2:30pm. We were hoping to rent some bikes to ride to a cave, but the place to rent bikes was closed for like 2 weeks and they were having some party or something. So we tried to walk it, but after two hours we turned around.

Ranz gave a pen to some kids we passed who wanted it to do their English homework and they all started counting in English. He told them he wanted it back on his way back, but we didn’t get it when we went back and he called them a bunch of liars. It was funny (except that we were out a pen).

The road was pretty dusty and muddy in places. We swatted at insects at times because of the standing water. Our feet definitely got dirty because we were both wearing sandals. It was a good walk, though.

We played a lot of the movie game, as well as some other games (name the college mascot, our version of the pyramid game). Now I just showered and we ate our apples as our dinner.

While we didn’t get to see the cave, the walk in itself was worth the spectacular mountain views.

8:43pm – Scratch that. We went up to the restaurant at our resort for dinner. I got an egg and cheese sandwich. Now we’re back in our room getting ready for bed.

A spider got into our room and when we tried to kick it out the door, its egg sack exploded and tons of little baby spiders started running around. We stomped most of them and got the mom spider out. There are still a lot of bugs in our room.

We ended up playing some two-person Catch Phrase and gave each other some pretty funny clues. Good times.