We woke up in the morning a little sore from the long day before, and with a few blisters on our feet as well. We ate breakfast, did some blister care, and packed up to get ready to leave. Our campsites were a little more developed than I had expected, with a shelter of some sort where we could eat meals, a tap with water, and some kind of outhouse. I was expecting to literally be in a meadow or something with no infrastructure, but given the volume of hikers the trail sees, I suppose it makes sense to have some basics in place.
Anyway, we got organized and set off, initially along a pretty wide trail that looked like it was being turned into a road. The big construction tire tracks looked pretty fresh and it looked like there had been some landslides, but we just enjoyed the easy trail and gradual decline….until we rounded a corner and saw this:
Suddenly we put two and two together and realized the fresh tire tracks and the vague construction beeping noises we had heard meant that there was a bulldozer on our path right this second, in the way of our continued walk down. The bulldozer was apparently trying to level out several huge piles of dirt, going back and forth while being way too close to the edge of the hill for my mother’s comfort, while the rest of us watched and hoped it wouldn’t trigger another landslide. Eventually, the bulldozer operator finished this section and continued down. We quickly crossed the part of the path where he had been working, then cut down one of the hills to try to get out of the way as quickly as possible. However, we ran into the bulldozer one more time closer to the river.
There was a much narrower section of the path that had been taken out of another recent landslide, which was also closer to the river. It looked the bulldozer would eventually have to figure out something with this section, even though the path was probably as wide as one of its tires. Rather than waiting around to find out, they let us go past the bulldozer and we all hustled over the narrow part of the path and continued down toward the river.
From there, the path continued with some ascents and descents, and continued to be wetter as well. There were several lovely waterfalls:
And after these our group would usually bunch up closer together because people would stop to take pictures etc.
But other times the group was more spread out and we got to enjoy the beautiful day quietly.
After about 3 hours we reached a little resting spot where we ate our snacks and enjoyed the local animals:
(It's a turkey!)
Eventually our gradual descent led us right to the river:
This was a nice change of pace, and we had seen the river the whole day, but hadn’t actually been this close to it. The walk from there continued to have some ups and downs, but was less steep than earlier in the day, which was nice for our tired feet. We eventually reached a small town and found our campsite, which was basically the backyard of a restaurant. We ate lunch there and had the afternoon to relax after a 6 hour day of walking. We were told there was a beach nearby to the campsite, but it actually started to get colder, even though we weren’t at altitude anymore, so we didn’t explore the beach. Instead, several of the boys organized themselves to play a soccer game against some of the locals at the school next door, which was entertaining to watch, although I forgot to bring the camera. I believe the gringos won and were very proud of themselves.
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