Bells and Whistles: Cool sculptures, horse stable, and more

Friday, June 2, 2023

Cool sculptures, horse stable, and more

This day we decided to ride the bus again, this time to a place called Humedales de Huasao. It was a pretty long ride actually. About an hour. Hazel said she and Wyatt and Orrin were sitting by a guy who was factiming someone and for a minute he flipped his camera around to show whomever he was talking to the gringos on the bus.

Some kids playing soccer.

So the park was ...not as great as I was expecting. It was small, and not as many sculptures as I was expecting. However, they were cool. And the place was green and full of plants, which was not at all like Cusco, so it felt really nice actually (I just don't know if I would have driven an hour if I had realized).

So, at some point Javier had mentioned that Talmage should come help him at his stables sometimes, but what ended up happening instead is that all of us went and helped on a Saturday, in exchange for a deeply discounted price for a trail ride that I will post about later.

First of all, Javier had a truck but it didn't have enough seats, so me, Jethro, Hazel, and Ethne followed behind on a bus. However, we got to the stop we thought Javier had told us to get off at, no one was there. We couldn't call him (I didn't have a sim card in my phone) so we waited for quite a long while. Finally Javier found us and we walked over to his truck and piled in the back once we got to a dirt road.

We got to his stables and Jethro and Brett started machete-chopping cornstalks into smaller pieces which we fed to the horses.

The rest of us cleaned water troughs made of tires and refilled them.

Some of us started brushing and oiling saddles and tack.

We stopped and had lunch from Javier, of fresh mangos, bananas, and avocado sandwiches. Yummy! But I've never eaten a mango like that--he just peeled them and then we ate them off the pit like an apples. Navy had juice all over herself--they were very juicy!

Then we started washing and combing the horses, and a few of them we gave baths.

Then Javier took us out to eat at a place called Emily's Chicken which had a play place (Jethro, Hazel, Ethne and I took a taxi this time).

Navy with her chicken-foot soup. Hazel tried it, so then Navy had to try it too. We had pollo a la braza and it was yummy.

I think this was the day we ended up not having church because they were having a local election or something. We went for a walk after we watched a conference session.

This was on Orrin's TWELFTH birthday!!! I can't believe it. We went to San Blas market for his birthday lunch. It was far busier that day for some reason than any other time we'd been there.