there is no coffee anywhere and I'm starting to associate the taste of terrible breakfasts and Chilean nescafe with ridiculously early mornings, sun rising and dust settling over Choschuenco, boys footsteps pounding up rickety stairs, smiling in a second language.
In the afternoon, when classes are over, I jump into the pick up truck and we drive somewhere, the Rio Fuy, deeper into the Andes to a park and huck 30 footer with a landing softer than air, a series of swimming holes that is all sunlight and aqua. The truck rides are long and loud, jostling us around like Jiffy pop, we usually have a few of the kids in the truck with us and some playboats tied down in the back, and we give them a hard time and make them laugh and buy them ice creams, if we're lucky enough to find a hole in the wall place like we did the other day.
once again, I'm learning how to laugh in a different language, which is good, because laughter is the universal language, not math, and we stand in front of an old man with no teeth and squinting eyes and we're laughing, he's laughing, what a happy old man you are! we tell him. you have no idea what we're saying!! he folds over in laughter, takes our money and we leave with candy bars that end up tasting nothing like candy bars.
These pictures are from a day off, a Sunday we spent at the aqua and sunshine swimming hole, with everyone lying out on the rocks and the gutsy Palmer leading the charge of jumping off the highest cliffs, boys doing backflips, and swimming headfirst into a powerful little waterfall that took you down, down, down, 7,8 ,9 seconds, where everything is white and clear and foamy, and you're swimming for the top and swimming, 10, 11, you break through into sunlight in the areated pool.
These pictures are from a day off, a Sunday we spent at the aqua and sunshine swimming hole, with everyone lying out on the rocks and the gutsy Palmer leading the charge of jumping off the highest cliffs, boys doing backflips, and swimming headfirst into a powerful little waterfall that took you down, down, down, 7,8 ,9 seconds, where everything is white and clear and foamy, and you're swimming for the top and swimming, 10, 11, you break through into sunlight in the areated pool.Then the run up, scouting a waterfall the Demshitz runs that seems improbable because it lands in rocks and gore (but they run it anyway...) running around the craziest eco-hotel you've ever seen, a billion dollar resort made out of water and mist and wood, sneaking the kids in and running them around, an entire hotel made of moss, gliding up and down in the elevators, making them laugh and sneak, our own little adventure upon adventure, seeing them turn into kids again, then back in the truck, home via the ice cream and the old man who laughed.
Then home and the full moon hoisted above the cliffs of Patagonia, sleep like a trance, and start the next morning with the terrible breakfasts, the Nescafe that tastes like last night's vivid dreams, and dirt.