Avila National Park!

11-9-06 Friday night the group of us went to Caracas to meet up with a “friend” of Javier and to go to a bar and hang out some. It ended up being a 20 mil cover charge (about 8 dollars I think) but that got us 6 drinks each of the foofy girl kind (none of this beer crap), so not that bad. The music was mostly Reggaeton and techno and a bit of Merengue (no salsa) but it was really fun and loud and exciting. So we were there dancing and having fun until about 4 in the morning and then came home to IVIC (about 5 in the morning) and decided to get up at 7 the next day to climb to the highest point in Avila National Park! Well, 8 didn’t really work out and by the time we got there it was about 3 in the afternoon and then the guards decided to pull apart EVERYTHING in our bags to look for drugs and weapons so by the time we actually started climbing it was about 3:30. At first it was really hot but not all that steep, just a nice mountainside climb. By about 6 we entered some trees which was nice, but it became much steeper and was just like the dune climb in that we kept thinking we could see the summit and when we got there there was one more hill and one more and one more and we were running out of water…. so finally we found a little stream which we drank from so that was ok but it was starting to get dark….. By the time it was dark we found something like a campsite but our guide told us it would be safer to keep climbing to a real campsite with water so we hiked for I have no clue how long in the dark by flashlight up a narrow curvy trail with tree roots and steep dropoff and all that good stuff. It seemed like forever. The next day we climbed up onto the ridge of the mountians and then left our bags while we hiked quickly up to the summit, which was of course gorgeous and the clouds lifted just as we reached the top so we got a great view of Caracas on one side and the port towns and ocean on the other.

We camped this night too, although we hadn’t planned on it, because our guide thought that if we kept hiking we would come into a dangerous part of Caracas at night. Unfortunately we had very little food, so we had to ration it out. We got up and left the campsite by 5 the next morning and although the sun wasn’t up the moon was nearly fun and there was plently of light and all the lights of Caracas below us as we hiked in the morning briskness and a huge sea of clouds covering the land beyond Caracas and the sun coming up, it was one of the most gorgeous moments of my life, I felt like some intreped traveler from like Lord of the Rings or something. For breakfast we stopped and ate basically all the food left, with the exception of a few fast energy sources that we saved for lunch. So we ate basically tuna with cheeze whiz, mayonaise, and diablito (kinda like spam I guess)… possibly the worst 4 foods in the world. And Louise, who’s vegetarian, ate a bit of corn and some babyfood (don’t ask me why we had babyfood on the top of the mountian, I don’t know!).

On the way down I was hiking pretty slowly to help one girl who was struggling a bit, which was actually pretty cool cause I had plently of time to stare at plants and watch them change from subparamo to cloud forest to mostly ferns and bamboo. Actually there was tons of bamboo all the way down, at the very top the vegetation was mostly just bamboo, Irises, Lycopodium, and something that looks just like Potentilla but is actually some other Rosaceae that must be closely related. We made it back to Caracas a little after noon and VERY hungry and went with our big back packs into a resturant and stuffed ourselves before returning to IVIC and a very angry Jose (we were supposed to be at work all day)….

16-9-06 So the last week (besides Monday in Avila) was spent in a little room sitting doing nothing and breathing Naphtaline (stuff to preserve the butterflies) which is pretty horrid. The first few days were the worst because I was basically undoing all the work that we’d done before because we had hand made etiquetas for all the individual butterflies with their individual code, but now we printed them out on the comp. so I was searching among the butterflies and replacing hand made tickets with comp. made ones. Very boring. Recently I have been entering family, genus and species info about butterflies onto the database, which is at least a bit more interesting because I can see the info about the butterflies as I enter it and get a little bit more familiar with the different families and stuff. This weekend I’m basically doing nothing because I’m fighting off a cold and we were going to go to the beach but it didn’t work out and the boys went to Caracas but I didn’t catch them before they left…sooooo I’m catching up on correspondants and sleeping! And then one more week of working menial labor here and coming home on the 25th AND for any of you who haven’t heard… I HAVE A JOB! I’m heading out west basically as soon as I get home, to go to California and work as a naturalist teaching elementary and middle school kids about the environment and things like that. So I’ll be out there until June or so! You should all come visit me. I’ll teach you to surf!