We just got back from a weekend in the high jungle about 4 hours away from Huancayo. Henry, our driver who drives us around to our volunteer sites, took us this weekend everywhere and he knew all the spots to go way off the beaten path. He is such a sweet little man! We had another girl who we met here at the HIV center who is volunteering here for 5 weeks with another organization from Texas A&M who came with us. We left early yesterday morning, and the drive through all the mountains and highlands and changing scenary to the jungle was absolutely breathtaking!! The landscape here is so gorgeous, but it is sad how terribly impoverished and dirty all the scarce little "towns" are amidst all the beauty. When we passed through all the highlands mountains we constantly passed all these indigenous people with tons of sheep and donkeys and llamas in the fields. Several times we had to stop for a huge herd of sheep to cross the road! It's crazy how remote some of these people live, soo far from everything! We saw some just like little hut like houses out in the middle of the highland mountains and people working the fields all over the mountain sides. Such a rugged, remote style of life. You even see little kids all over the place in the middle of nowhere herding sheep and working. We passed through several towns on the way, Juala, Tingopaccha, Huaricolca, Tarma, and then finally arrived to San Ramon, where we went to the first waterfall, like a 30 minute hike, which was gorgeous but didn't compare at all to the two we went to today. Then after we went to this weird like tourist trap native town, where some of the Ashinka native tribe live in the middle of nowhere and they grab you and take you and dress you up like them in native clothes and then tell you their story in Spanish and Ashinka, which I had to poorly translate for our group! Then they just kinda dance around with you and ask you to make a donation...then they want you to shop through their handmade crafts, kind of a scam, but kind of sad because they are so poor and that's how they depend on trying to make money.

We ate lunch at this restaurant along the Chanchamayo River which runs all through the mountains there in the jungle. It was good typical food from the area. We went by a coffee plantation as this area is where coffee is mostly cultivated and proccessed in Peru. Then Henry took us to the little town of La Merced to spend the night in a hotel. The next morning we left early and drove around deeper into the jungle for like 1 1/2 hours and then hiked up to another awesome waterfall winding through steep steps and slick rocks. But it was so so gorgeous and just sort of pops out of nowhere. Then we hiked to another bigger waterfall, with  a bunch of different cascades and went swimming under the falls and then jumped off one smaller fall into a pool area. It was so awesome! And we were the only people there at first because it was still morning. We spent quite a bit of time there, and then we just drove back and just got back. Fun, but tiring weekend. Now we still have to plan our lessons for tomorrow, and we have a new volunteer joining us tonight who has been in Trujillo with another FIMRC volunteer group.