Since all of our group arrived early, we invited them to join us on our final days of scouting. Everyone said, “YES,” so we took them to a different river from the one we had visited the day before, with kids swimming and women doing laundry.
It was lightly raining, the hills enshrouded in mist. We passed fields of corn, orange groves, villages …
…and sometimes, as here, a house set back from the road at the foot of the steep hills.
When we arrived at our destination, women were doing laundry and children were swimming and bathing in the river. Antonio, our driver who was also with us the day before, asked permission for us to photograph. The ladies declined, but the children were eager.
They took turns swinging on a branch that draped into the river.
A couple of the girls who were selling their mothers’ baskets came up to me and wanted to see what I had photographed. They wanted me to photograph them, too.
We started along the river path up the mountain.
On the way, there were some beautiful flowers to photograph…
We continued up to the cave, an enormous one that dwarfed us all. After donning life vests to keep us from getting tired as we pulled ourselves upstream against the strong current using handholds we found in the smooth rocks, our headlamps lighting the way. Once we got up to some inner falls, we found places to sit and turned off our lamps. Upstream a short ways, we could see the faint light of a small exit in the cave. It was magical with the stalactites and stalagmites.
We floated down the long passage back out of the cave, exhilarated from our adventure, and sat on the rocks and enjoyed the view. If you saw a person up on the rocks, you would see how they would be dwarfed by the great height of the cave. All our people, however, were down with us!
I should note that we have not had time to process any of these images. The only thing that has been applied to them is Margo’s Tweaks which we’ll be giving to our group this morning.
More anon…
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