New Years Adventure

Feliz Año Nuevo! For our new years festivities, we celebrated Saturday into Sunday!

We were invited to join one of the long term volunteers with some of his friends to a bonfire and midnight mountain climb! I got in Saturday and took a quick afternoon nap in the volunteer house before the festivities. We also went to a super market here, which was basically a mini mall with everything in it. I also finally got a ride in "the beast" which is the WindAid vehicle. It's a vehicle covered in fake grass with the WindAid logo on it. It was created as a float for a parade and was never converted back since! I'll post a photo sometime soon, but I was supposed to get a ride in it from the airport, but it had a flat tire, so I rode in a taxi instead.

Around dinner time Saturday, we took a taxi to the base of the nearest mountain. At this location, the group we were with is part of a small group of people trying to create a nursery for desert type plants that aren't surviving in the area. We helped water some of the plants too! It was all along the sand dunes at the base of a mountain. There was a lot of cacti trying to grow. The watering system was a series of pipes used to irrigate the plants with a series of valves.

After a bonfire, and some homemade hot chocolate, we climbed a mountain to see New Year's fireworks!! About 10 of us went up a mountain in nearby Trujillo - five WindAid volunteers, including myself and a the remaining were friends of the long term volunteers. The whole ordeal involved walking up massive sand dunes to a very rocky mountain! We made it almost to the top by midnight just to see the fireworks ringing off for New Years. We never got back until 3am. Regardless, it was an awesome experience! The first photo is from the plane and the mountain in the distance we climbed, and the video is the view from the top at night!

View from the plane

View from the mountain

We got back at 3am this morning, slept a while, and after hanging around a bit, we went to a restaurant and got some authentic peruvian food! I tried Cerviche, which is fresh raw fish in a lemon/lime marinade and onion mixture. We also had fried fish. I'm not a fish lover, and it was all surprisingly excellent!

After, six of us piled into a 4 person taxi, and headed to Huanchaco, a nearby beach! We spent some time in the frigid water and walking on the busy beach. We came back to the house and got some dinner to tide us over until tomorrow when we start the manufacturing process!! I'm SUPER excited to get started and will post as much as I can about the process.

Some interesting things I've noticed about the culture here, the traffic is crazy and all of the taxi drivers (and regular drivers) drive like they are in the crazy taxi video game. It's mostly stop and go, and I really haven't gotten as car sick as I thought I would. There's lots of speed bumps and the all the vehicles I've ridden in have manual transmissions. There's a lot of old VW punch bugs floating around, which is neat to see. Also, in Peru, you're not supposed to flush toilet paper!

On another note, one of the guys who's here permanently ran over a stray small dog with the beast a while back, and they adopted him and took care of him after the accident! He's extremely cute and his back legs are healing, but he's walking around quite often.

So far, I've meet volunteers originally from South Africa, Australia, Great Britain, Sri Lanka, Columbia, Hungary, St. Vincent and currently, three of us live in New York! No where near me, but more towards the NYC. It's awesome to have such a diverse group of minds! I think we're almost all here. There should be a total of 12 volunteers, including myself, and up to 9 long term volunteers/interns. We start an orientation type day tomorrow at 0900 hours!