An eventful week

As the one month countdown has started, I am realizing a little bit more every day how much I love Todos Santos.
The last week has been very eventful, I don’t even know where to start. First of all, I have been living on my own in a house for over 3 months, 10 minutes away from the center. I love my place, but I have to admit that I often get very lonely. I’m used to living on my own in Canada but when you’re so far away from home, it’s not the same. The huge festivities (Dia de los Muertos) of the last few days have brought a lot of tourists in the village, which means that the other rooms of my house were occupied. At first it felt so strange, after being so quiet, there were suddenly people everywhere! But I got used to it very quickly and really enjoyed it. I met great people from many different countries and made great contacts!

Also, being with tourists made me rediscover the beauty of Todos Santos and made me realize how special this place was. We walked around a lot, met so many different locals from the village and other communities, had great conversations with them about many different issues and once again I learned so much. They are such hard working, courageous, humble and warm people, and most of them have such difficult lives! I get so angry when I hear some of their stories and I am always wondering how I could keep on helping them when I leave. It’s too easy to go back home and go on with my life like nothing was happening here. The injustice of this world is just unbelievable.

All Saints’ Day’s festivities were fantastic. On the first day, there were horse races all day. Costumed men were galloping from one end of the road to the other in front of crowds of people, struggling not to fall off their horse because they were all so drunk. Obviously many of them fell off but I didn’t see anyone get really hurt. The more the day went by, the more drunk men passed out on the street. Alcoholism is a severe issue here that nobody is dealing with at the moment. Also, there was music on the street, food vendors, tombola, and so many people. Because everyone is wearing the traditional clothes, it was a visual delight.

The next morning, all the festivities were taking place in the cemetery. Families were visiting their dead relatives and leaving flowers, candles and other decorations in front of their gravestones. Some people were also doing offerings (burning candles, bread, bottles of Coca Cola, etc) to commemorate their dead. But the most special part of it was the numerous bands or marimba playing music in the cemetery and the costumed men dancing and drinking! The contradiction of the scene of a woman wailing for her dead son next to a group of 4 drunken men dancing was very interesting.

Today, a Spanish girl that I had met in the village and I woke up at 5AM because we wanted to go to La Torre, the highest non-volcanic point of Central America (3828m). We took a bus to La Ventoza and from there we started walking up. We met a shepherd named Marcelino who was also going up there with his sheep so we ended up walking with him and chatting. I was talking, not paying too much attention to the road. When we arrived at the summit, it was so foggy that we could see absolutely nothing. No view, no volcano, nada. How disappointing! Marcelino made us a fire in a rock shack and Sandra started meditating while I was just trying to warm up. We stayed there for a while until the sky cleared up and we could finally see a beautiful view. Unfortunately it was still a little bit cloudy and we couldn’t see any of the volcanoes, but it was still worth it.

I know (everybody knows) that I have so sense of directions whatsoever, so I knew I could never go back down without getting lost. Sandra seemed pretty ok with it so we went, without worrying too much. Soon enough we got lost. When I say lost, I mean totally lost. There was nothing in sight, we had absolutely no idea where we were, we couldn’t find our way back up because everything around us looked exactly the same (trees, rocks, grass, dirt). There was kind of a dirt path so I thought, well, if we follow it, it HAS to lead somewhere, wherever it is, as long as we find ONE person. I was totally discouraged, there was no way we would find our way back without any help. I was picturing us sleeping in the mountains, with 300ml of water left, a mandarin and 4 cookies. What a disaster! A while later, Sandra tells me to shut up. Beeeeehhhhh. Sheep! Technically, if there were sheep, there was at least one human being somewhere not too far way. HAY ALGUIENNNNNNNNNN??? (Is anybody there?) screamed Sandra with as loud as she could. And then we heard a kid yelling something. WE WERE SAVED! We screamed back and forth until we saw the kid in the distance sitting on a rock. He showed us the way and we realized how lost we really were. We probably would have got there eventually, we just don’t know how long it would have taken.

I honestly thought we would have to spend the night in the mountains. Before leaving we were even joking about tourists who had got lost before, and we ended up doing exactly the same. They had a good reason, there was a lot of fog and they couldn’t see where they were going. We were just plain disoriented. This made me realize how dumb I had been in the past, going trekking for days and days on my own. Awful idea. Never again.