WHOAH. I was sure that these weren't gonna upload. What a relief....
Okay so these are pics of what I did on my summer vacation --- I mean these are pics of what I did yesterday. That big "Morla the Ancient One" from The Neverending Story-looking thing above is called Chivaturco. The summit is at about nine thousand feet above sea level. I can see it from my site, but from the top I could barely see my site, and my site is an entire city. Actually, my site is IN this photograph but it's probably not going to be able to be seen in a high enough resolution by most of you to actually pick it out. Anyways, I went up to Chivaturco yesterday with that guide Fernando (Toucan) to poke around, summit the mountain, document the attraction so as to make materials for visitors who are interested in seeing it themselves, and to try and blaze and make plans to blaze trails up top, because as you will see, it's very very overgrown. Definitely not a trip for the flabby girly weakling nothing persons that Hans and Frans from SNL like to make fun of. Anyways, to give you some perspective, I estimate that that vertical cliff you see on the right side of the mountain is between five hundred and a thousand feet high. Hard to estimate because there aren't any accurate maps of the area yet.

I have some cool pictures of the pre-Incan ruins that are up there waiting to be discovered by some crack university archaeology team but alas, the restrictions of the internet here make it so that I won't show them today. Maybe another time.

There's Fernando hacking and slashing away with his machete (totally and utterly a neccessity here). One of the reasons for making the visit was to help document the conditions of the area for the alcalde (mayor or administrative head) of the region ... if this place is going to be even a little bit developed for the tourism industry, some trails will have to be made. Currently, this is what the terrain looks like. This is actually pretty open and accessible too, because on the really bad stuff I was afraid to take out my camera for fear of dropping it off into the green mossy void and losing it forever. Not to mention it was so steep that I always had to hang on with two hands. If I turned to look at something for more than a few seconds Fernando was already out of sight and with the vegetation so thick you can imagine that I couldn't even hear him moving if he was much more then ten feet away. This place is WILD.

A surreal example of native plantlife and a hint at the view from near the top.

I took this shot from the very edge of that cliff you saw in the photo above, looking down into the valley. You really should view this one up close. On the ride up to the beginning of the hike it was really early in the morning and so all of those ridgelines and valleys had alternating bands of horizontal light creeping over them and the texture of the land was emphasized to an extreme degree. Really pretty if you can imagine it.

Yes, I can buy Nutella here. Actually there's a place across the street that sells it. No, the round-the-world series of exotic Nutella photos has not ended. It will NEVER end as long as I have a tongue to taste the sweet sweet chocolate hazelnut goodness and a camera with which to take the pics. NEVER!!!!!!!!