Paradise sleeps in

We woke up early today to meet up with the Brits and Australians we met up with at the gorge so that we could share a taxi to a nearby wetlands. We made plans to meet up at 8:30am so we thought we'd get up early to grab some street food. Unfortunately not much goes on in town before 9am. Not only were there very few food vendors out and about, but there weren't even any taxis for us to take out to the wetlands that early. So we went to the Compass Café, this very nice western style café. After finally heading out to grab a cab we did a bit of negotiating to get out to this place. It was supposed to be only 7km away so after much haranguing on the price, mostly thanks to our newly made Australian friends Tamima and Mez who speak near perfect Mandarin, we talked the taxi into taking us for 60Y out and back and wait for us there. That's just under 10$ US for the 6 of us. Not a bad deal. When we finally made it out to the place, we were a bit disappointed to see that it was not a very exciting wetlands with trash strewn around. Then they wanted to charge us 30Y to get in which we still would have to pay for the horseback riding that was our original motivation for going. After a bit of haggling again we ended up getting in for 120Y between the 6 of us and had quite a ball just in haggling. At one point we tired to get the to throw in a free mini yak, they they didn't budge.





When we finally got in, it was slightly less impressive and turned out the only way to get around inside was to rent a horse. Here we worked out haggling magic to negotiate an additional 10 minutes on the horses for the same price. And we were off. Our local guides were chatting it up with each other and having a great time, as were we. We saw some free range pigs, some rummaging cows and a big expanse of wetlands. I was a bit concerned that Andrea's horse was going to bite my leg since every now and then it kept snapping at my horse, which were both being pulled by our guide, a very sweet older woman dressed in traditional garb. She was so sweet, she even snapped up my camera and took a bunch of photos of me, Andrea, me and Andrea, me, Andrea and everyone else...well you get the idea. Since Andres still had her camera, she was able to snap up a few photos of them photographing us.



When we finally used up our 30 minutes, we decided to take up try our hand at some archery. I loaded up a few videos of all our attempts. Andrea showed off her Oklahoma roots by firing the arrow right into the target on the first pull and then repeating the feat only moments later. I did manage to hit the target on one of my three attempts...so not too shabby. All in all, our second day in paradise has been fun. And now we are going to do some hostel shopping this evening hoping to find a more charming place than the one we are staying in now. But the good thing is we managed to get our laundry done...one thing about packing lightly is to constantly keep up on the laundry...or bear the wrath of an odoriferous journey.