Day One: Part 3

I crashed last night around 9pm (and I mean crashed... my roommate came in and attempted to have a conversation with me about 9:45 and the words coming out of my mouth made no sense at all). So now it is 3:30am and I am ready for my day. I think I may just give up on this attempting to conquer jet-lag. I am only here for a little but of time, we have to be on a flight at 3:00am tomorrow, and I have lots to do. I'll have time to sleep after I'm dead, right?

Day One: Part Three
(In which we play tourist and don’t see our destination but find an awesome Chinese food place)

So we made it to the top of the highest mountain. But what goes up has to come down, even if it means butt-scootching (sometimes unintentionally). We made it to the bottom with a few falls and a twisted knee, but we still made it. It was time to move forward to the next destination. I think the group that made it to the top of the mountain just wanted to lie down and not move for three days, but Ben assured us that the tank was only like a 2 minute hike, and once we started hiking towards that tank we would be able to see it almost immediately. 

The sun was beginning to set as we pulled off to the side of the road where we were to start trekking into the woods. We pushed through a piece of jungle to meet a road with some of the reddest (and stickiest) mud I have ever seen. The road wasn't too bad. It was flat and the killer grass we had at the last hike appeared nonexistent. Our first obstacle was a little, red pond that expanded across the road. Clinging to trees, we balanced along the foot-wide ledge taking very small steps in order NOT to fall in. Regardless, we still accomplished to get mud all over us. 

We continued down the road, wondering how long of a two minute hike would it take before we started to see the tank. Ben decided to run ahead to see if he could find it (as dark was approaching and the clouds seemed ominous), only to run back to tell us that he mistook the distance of the tank and we would not get to see it. So we turned around to trek back across the muddy pond. In that process we got a new layer of mud upon the first layer that had begun to cake a little. 

Dark had settled in as we approached the cars. Then the rain came. I ran to our rental car to throw in the camera (no worries, it's safe), then stand in the rain with the rest of the crew removing our shoes and socks, rolling up our pants, and taking off our outer-most layers before we got in the car in order to save the car from an enormous cleaning fee.

It was fun to walk through our resort hotel barefoot, caked with red mud, while juggling all of our wet (and now red) clothes and shoes.

We decided food in our bellies would make us all happier, showered, then met for dinner. Down the road we found a Chinese food place. We sat around a large table with a large lazy susan in the middle of it and began to contemplate the series of delectable choices. Expecting serving sizes like the servings from a Chinese place on the Mainland, each of us ordered at least 2 items from the menu. I thought maybe the eyebrow raises we got from our waitress had to do with the fact that we were a rag-tag group of kids that just came back from an exhaustifying hike. Nope. The serving sizes were ginormous! Each item got a dinner-plate-full of food. That was what our waitress's eyebrow raises and the lazy susan were for! I am sure the waitress just thought we were typical Americans who eat like there will be no tomorrow. We had so much food that we had ate until we almost popped, then filled 5 take-home boxes.

We laughed so hard around the table. The camaraderie on this trip has been outstanding and our trek to the top of the mountain, to the invisible tank, and to the Chinese food place-of-overeating created memories of good times that will last for my lifetime.