MUNGO EATS Latin America

dink a dink dink dink a dink dink mrow mrow mrow!

The power is out!  I think that it still is, anyway.  I can light a BIC LIGHTER!!!!  We used my amazing skills to light a candle last night.  Since the power was out, we needed one.  It went out at around 4 pm and when we left Uyuni it was still out!  Rotten cow corpses!  GROSSSSSSSSSSS! 

We drove about 20 minutes before we got stuck in some mud.  We had turned off the main road because it was really, really, REALLY bumpy.  Mom asked Dad if the road was still okay and if it wasn’t to soft and he said that it was fine.  Then the  road got wetter and WETTER and WETTER and WETTER!  And then we were

     STUCK! (this picture doesn’t show the stuckness but believe me!)

As we were busy getting stuck, Sean and I noticed a white car on the other side of the road quickly losing speed.  Sean said “If those guys get stuck they won’t have any more luck than us”.  Right after he said that two guys popped out and tried to push their car out of the mud.

After we were finished getting stuck, Mom noticed the guys on the other side of the road so she and Dad wandered over to help them.  I got my shoes on too and ran out to join them.  We started to push the car and I stood right where the tire flung all the mud.  I got a big clod of mud up my snorg!!  Once we got them out they drove back to the bumpy road and parked.  Then they came over to help us.  When the driver walked through the big puddle in the ditch he said “Fria, fria, fria!”  Oh, come on, it isn’t that cold!  We pushed the van out of the mud that was GOOEY!  Amazing, we thought that we would need a tractor to pull us out!  They left and Dad parked in their spot.

Now we had to get the trailer out of the goop!  When we drive  in the mud the  trailer fenders glom up with mud so the wheels don’t turn.  So we emptied the trailer and put little blocks of wood under the tires.  The problem with this is that we only have six pieces of wood,  two long, two medium, two short.    But eventually we got onto harder ground and we just ran and pushed at the same time.  Mungo really didn’t like that.  He was okay when we were just pushing it on the wooden blocks.  He could just squeak at us then.  But now we were running away from him!  So he had to jump out of the open window and sped along in front of a Toyota Landcruiser.  Then he splashed through the big muddy puddle and cut his foot on a rock then he reached us.  And got in trouble.   But his foot is fine and he didn’t get hit by a truck, so that’s okay.

Then we drove about 90km and camped here!

  A big mud/salt flat.  It was so flat and empty that Dad let me and Sean drive.  But we didn’t get to work the clutch.

Ta-Da!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

dink a dink dink dink a dink dink mrow mrow mrow!

Two days ago we went to Uros islands.  The Uros islands are floating on Lake Titikaka.  They make island with reeds and slowly pile more and more reeds on top when the old ones get  dry until your island touches the bottom of the lake.  On the island that we went to, the lake is 18 1/2 metres deep.  That’s a lot of reeds!  During the rainy season, the reed’s root-clumps detach from the bottom of the lake and you get reeds floating on clumps of dirt that are a metre thick!  They tie hundreds of these together and place reeds on top of them, side-to-side, front-to-back, then diagonal both directions.  Then they build houses out of reeds and install the radios, TV’s, lights, and solar panels.  Apparently the president of Peru couldn’t sleep knowing that the Uros didn’t have electricity. 

Once we got to the island, we sat down on a big reed bench.  Edwin, the “president” of the island, showed us how they made the islands and they pulled a big chunk of root-clump up and put his hand right into the water!  He said that there are six families on the island, 23 people.  The total Uro population is about 2000.  There is a “mayor” too, who is the boss of all 2000 Uros.  Later they split us up into groups of four, so I was with a German guy, a Brazilian girl, and a Peruvian girl.  The German guy didn’t understand very much Spanish, the Peruvian girl had to translate for him into English, so it was okay.  The woman who was showing us her house had no children, so she had a pretty small house.  Sean and Dad went to the president’s house!

After visiting the Uros, we rode for two hours and got to the island Taquile, where some descendents of the Incas live.  They have this big thing with hats, each hat having a meaning.   Boys under the age of five wear a frilled hat with red on the bottom, white on the top.  Girls of the same age wear a frilled hat with red of the bottom, brown on the top.  Once the boys turn five, they wear a hate that is red on the bottom, white on the top with no frill.  That means that they are single men.  When they marry, they make an unfrilled hat that is all red.  When girls reach the age of five,  they have to wear a black shawl.  Our guide told us that single women have a shawl with big pompoms, married women have small pompoms.  But we couldn’t see any pattern at all, most wore big pompoms, even the ones with children, and some children who were six or seven years old had small pompoms.  So I don’t think there is any pompom pattern at all.   

         

    Jup liro reeto kezen irutenteekreidirutenfasek irutenteekreidirutenmits irutenteekreidiruten witen Noznoseish.  Scrat(Sean sop jup) insid stort grapodig.  Jup liro pravia babsif, kezjupen!  Kog, teg, sot, lom, ors, gof, arm, zek, jup, guj, kez, gol, bos, erm, oop, som, narc, bor, pous, rew, guh, kov, wox, xow, poy, bew.  Stit!  Terlisan jup lirosef pravia fis degiv yoqris.  Kijed.

I TASTE LIKE CHICKEN

I can count to nine hundred ninety-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine in Noznoseish.  We(Sean and I) made this language.  I can do the alphabet! A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.  Yes!  But I can’t do it very fast.  Yet.

   I did this because I was bored and because Sean and I wanted to be able to talk in code with me.  Now he doesn’t know it as well as I do.  He just asks me how to say certain things when he wants to say something in Noznoseish.  Like at supper yesterday, “How do you say ‘octopus’ in Noznoseish?”.  For anyone who cares to know, it is “raseto”.  Then Sean said “Jup kobles rasetos”.  “I will eat octopi”.

We are camped in a desert.  The end.

Anyone still reading this is rewarded with the actual blog about the desert that we are camped in.  Did you think I was serious?  

The desert is a desert-ish desert.  It has lots of sand dunes and isn’t 100% flat, it’s 75% flat.  The other 25% is vegetation, mountains, and dunes.  I actually like the general flatness, but I hate the spots that have been irrigated.  I don’t like that emerald green plants are forced to grow in the desert by desperate farmers(I almost wrote “faeries” there).  The biggest irrigation ditches are lined with concrete and carry lots of muddy water in them.  You can drive over the next hill and all that is under it is a desert and an irrigation ditch parallel to the road.  And, of course, the road that is running parallel to the irrigation ditch. 

Sometimes the dunes have plants growing on top of them.  When this happens, all the dunes in that area have plants on top of them.  Then you pass into flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat desert with absolutely no dunes in the picture at all.  Then you reach a spot called “dune zone”.  There was an official sign on the road once that said “zona de dunas”.  And sometime in all of these different areas, you can see ocean waves breaking on the nearby shore.  It looks like there is no water to be found for miles, but in reality, it is right there.  It’s just undrinkable to any living thing, plant or animal.  It doesn’t matter to the dead animals that are busy being pecked out of their bones, though. 

Now we are safely parked off the dirt road that leads off the highway to the little fishing town.  The road continues past the town off to who knows where.  We are camped on a circular bit of land that juts off the road.  In easy reach is a perfect beach, a tall sand dune, and a cave that you really wouldn’t want to be stuck in at high tide.  It’s very rocky and all the trash piles at an invisible line tell you that the tide obviously makes it up there sometimes and the rough sand beneath your feet shows how hard it crashes into the cave walls when it does.  The trash line isn’t very far in to the cave so you can tell that once you reach a section where a wall almost blocks all passage, the water hardly ever reaches.  Here, there is no garbage and barely enough light to let you see where you lower your foot.  Actually, it’s a bit spooky.

Now we are covered in sand that has been blown all over us.  Once we get to Lima we will need to rid ourselves and the van of sand.          

Today we are sleeping at Cabanas Rio Yambala.  At the restaurant there are a bunch of business cards for different hostels, hotels, one beauty salon, and one book exchange.  Sean and I each have twenty cards and when we got back to the room, we played Closest to the Wall with them.   I lost, of course (I suck at those kinds of games), but we are just going to split them up again and play again after homework.  We each have our own “champs”, which are cards that won the most or stayed with us the longest.  My champ was “Hostal Santa Fe”, and Sean’s were “Hotel Rosim” and “Apartamentos Turisticos y Hostal Chordeleg”.  I don’t know why he had two champs, he just did.  I think that usually the best cards were the heaviest, which is Sean’s second champ, but the other two champs were both lightweight fighters. 

For supper we ate mashed potatoes under stew.  Our drink was a very light lemonade.  After supper we came back to the cabin.  I went a different way then Sean and totally freaked him out.  He could hear me but he couldn’t see me.  I finally convinced him to come back into the cabin and open the porch door.  There I was!  I took a different path, when it ended I went to the left and hopped over the railing onto the porch. Then we stayed out there to play with the cards because Mungo’s snorg would get in the way of our game.  Speaking of snorgs, there is a picture of a tapir in our room!