Today I went on a mini aventura... hiked down from my site to the town below, had NO IDEA how to get there except that if I just kept going south and downhill I´d eventually end up there... so I started on a little trail (sidetracked to poke around in some abandoned mine, pic below), then hit a dirt road, then left the road and tramped through some thick underbrush in a streambed, then hit another road, and eventually met up with the Magner Turner Mineralogical Museum, which I had visited just last week with Mom and so then knew roughly where I was.... anyways, the town int eh valley has this church up on a 450 foot hill and there is a zigzaggy path that leads up to it and passes by thirteen stations of the cross or something like that, so I crossed the river and climbed that in the SCORCHING El Oro sun and then took some pics back of the way I had come. One of those pics is above. My site is that (seemingly) little smattering of buildings nestled comfortably on the shoulder of that slope near the top of the pic. Harangutan: I spoke to you on the phone from one of those dirt roads in the right middle of the pic... Total descent from my Castillo was about 1,600 feet. Not much I admit, but dang when you don´t have a clue where you´re going or if you´re gonna get macheted in the face by some drunk miner and it´s screamingly hot and the dust is blowing in your face, what can ya do?

Interior of the mine I found, I mean literally stumbled across on my way down the hill. This was about 60 feet diagonally down into the main shaft. I think just today I passed about fifty mine shafts. Some active, some abandoned. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these little antfarm holes riddling the hills here, it´s amazing there aren´t more accidents and such to be heard about.

This is the door of one of the churches down in the town in the valley. It´s the center of the oldest gold mining operation in the country and certainly one of the oldest in the continent. Might be one of the only churches in the world with giant depictions of guys in hardhats on the front door. Cools.