Happy Birthday!

Dec 14

Happy birthday to me! We had booked some massages for mid-afternoon so we decided to spend the morning on a light 3hr hike around the valley.

 

Some of the mural around town

There are some awesome vistas from the trail and it eventually takes us into the village. We are surprised at how quiet the village is based on the popularity of the valley. We see mostly backpackers (they stand out a bit) and expats, small kids and shop keepers. It is not as heavily geared towards tourists, just a regular little town that has a lot of natural food stores and “new age hippie” hangouts. We stumble upon a chocolatier, and cannot resist the tasty looking morsels. This sparks a conversation with the owner Jose, who has Belgian roots but has lived in South America since he was eleven. After about a half hour conversation we carry on with our walk and make our way back up the hill to the Hotel in time for our massages. The treatment I chose was a full body massage and Reiki, Brenda chose the back massage with Facial and Reiki, both were $28 each and lasted 105minutes. So pretty good value we figured. From there it was time to get ready and head down to the village for the fundraiser, Clyde unfortunately ate something that did not agree with him yesterday and has been quite sick all day. Carolyn sent his regards and insisted on buying the first birthday drink that evening.

Cheers

The fundraiser event was very nice, I enjoyed a North American style roast beef dinner while the girls had a vegetarian Falafel with sweet potato salad. Everything was very tasty and we enjoyed getting to know each other and the other dinner guests. After the event was over we walked back up the hill with moonlight to help us see our way. Carolyn called it a night and had to check on Clyde but first she surprises me with a little gift. 

A nice piece of cotton cloth that I have used as a scarf and make-shift hood...so far.

Brenda and I decided to go to the hotel bar and see what was going on. It was pretty quiet but we enjoyed a couple games of pool then called it a night, a very nice birthday it was.

Dec.15

Time to move on, well maybe tomorrow, today is Sunday and it is not a good idea to cross the border on a Sunday. We decide to catch up on some writing and such, spending a nice relaxing day at the hotel and walking the 2km down the hill for lunch. Before we head out tomorrow we also needed to fill the bikes with gas, we like to start the day with a full tank rather than get all geared up only to stop 10 minutes later for gas. To our surprise there is no gas station in Vilcabamba and we would have to backtrack about 10km toward Loja in order to find a station. We decided to do this in the morning, despite the previous comment, as it was already dark and it is never smart to ride in the dark down here. We see Carolyn at the restaurant, Clyde is still not feeling well enough to leave their room.