Just so you know, I am choosing this moment in my life to express the extreme degree to which I loathe slow internet. People might say to me "Well MountainJedi, slow internet is better than no internet, so shut your festering pie hole." To them I say "pbbbbbbpbthhhh." These four photos took a solid HOUR to upload. And I should add that was after the two times the computer froze in the process of sending them. I rebooted it once just to show it I meant bidness, but still it took an hour. Sure I spent the time trying to look at Craigslist and reading the few emails I get from yall and checking out the news which is full of depressing-type things like quotes from world leaders saying embarrassing stuff like "Not often enough is the question asked - Is our children learning?" I mean really, what the heck is that about anyways? No they is not learning apparently.

Okay. It's cool now. TRANQUIL. The fury has passed. The internet is my friend. I will take a deep breath and be glad I'm at 4,000 feet instead of 12,000 feet in the cold and wind and such. Okay.

SO the above picture is from Cerro de Arcos as well. Behold thee one of the famed arcos. Yeah okay this one is small but we didn't have a lot of time to explore because there is only one Chiva that comes by the place in the afternoons and if you miss it your body will be found frozen stiff by some lucky pilgrim to the arcos who will then probably steal your clothes and whatever money you had on your person to use for paying for the Chiva ride you missed. So yeah, we didn't have a lot of time to explore and so I climbed up a small arch instead of one of the many much larger ones.

Here is a shot of me demonstrating what a fantastic place the cerro is for those travelers of the adventure sports persuasion. Fernando said, "Climb up there." I said, "Okay but I'm leaving my heavy ass pack here." He then replied, "No, bring it with you because we're going to go over the top and down the other side." Umm, he wasn't kidding. On the other side we shimmied down into an impossibly small hole that burped us out next to a cave that he informed me "Casi nadie conozcen" (Almost nobody knows). So that was cool. When I eventually head up there to go camping I won't have to bring my tent with me. Just some warm clothes and a sleeping bag, for the cave is as good a shelter today as it was for the people living in this area ten thousand years ago.

I don't remember the name of this flower but I do remember that it is known as the ... hmm ... the "something" of the Andes. I'd go ahead and guess that it's the paintbrush of the Andes, but I'm pretty sure that's not it, so scratch that. It's pretty though, eh? Lots of them up there on the cerro, and plenty of other species as well, white, yellow, red, purple, any color that you like. I have pics of most of them. That's why I ran out of space on my compactflash card!

Cave. Cave-in. Concave. Cavern. CrAVE. hugo ChAVEz.
I got nothin.
This is one of the caves up there (Not the secret one I mentioned a minute ago). I don't know why I did that with those sticks. I think it was the mefloquine I took the day before. That stuff makes you crazy.
Ciao. I'm so tired. I will try to avoid writing in the blog when I'm this tired. It's uncouth.
Write me, and if you don't feel like writing me, then please send me some Kraft Deluxe Macaroni and Cheese. The kind with the shells that they have at Sam's Club are my favorite. Thanks!