An amazing view

This week a friend (another volunteer), came up for a day with my project partner with the goal of planning a good hiking route to the highest mountain in the area to offer to visitors. We also just wanted to go horseback riding, and saw it as a good excuse. They arrived early and we spent a few hours looking for and prepping the horses till my 11 year old savior arrived.

I would say this kid knows more about animals and farming then most people in my community, he really is the horse whisperer, it’s incredible. Anyways so he had to go to the dentist but came back and got all the horses prepared and came with us for the morning (went back early for school at 2). We headed through the cacao and started up the hill, grabbed some mangos to eat and continued till we had to leave the horses because it became too steep.

It was a beautiful view overlooking the Oriental Mountain Range (one of the 3 main mountain ranges in the country), and while we ran into some horse problems (like mine being unresponsive to most urges to walk, to the point where my project partner or the horse whisperer would often just ride behind me or else mine would just stop. At the end I switched horses and got to run a bit).

Then the 3 of us tried our best to continue up the mountain, finding strategic rocks and trees and also crawling on our hands and knees. We didn’t bring a machete and weren’t able to make it to the top, and it’s definitely not suitable for groups, but it was an amazing view.

Then we headed back down the mountain, my horse continued to be stubborn, my project partner jumped on a cow, and we got back to the community. Then we took one last detour to go to one of the best mango trees in the area. It was only like a 5 minute ride away, but as soon as we got there it started to pour, and it continued for the 20 minutes that we stood there eating mango after mango. We were literally soaked to the skin even had our shoes full of muddy water,. It was a refreshing situation to just stand there and enjoy the rain, and having our biggest concern being the need for more mangoes.One of those I can't believe this is my life moments and a memory I'm sure I'll maintain long after Peace Corps. And the mangoes were indeed, extremely delicious.

Life is good!