heyo
I´m still alive. Back from a week near the Argentine border. We lived in a house. It was weird. I´m so used to living from my tent, the house seemed foreign. Shared rooms also meant that what little privacy we´ve had vanished. Also, the two girls we did have left on Tuesday, so it was a house of 6-9 guys, which if you hadn´t guessed, is a total mess and smells terrible. Jon played mama for the house a lot. He´s still such a good JA.
We rode in a wagon pulled by a tractor for 2 hours to get back to the base camp today--very cold, but cool views. We just raided the pantry here and are heading out for a 6 day backpacking trip. We´re heading into Valle Hermoso (Beautiful Valley) in Jenimeni National Reserve. There are a few lingering gaucho trails left over from the 150 years of pastoral use, but for the most part we´ll be off trail, navigating by map and compass. A friend here is lending us a GPS just in case. According to Christian (the head biologist here) only about 300 people visit the reserve in any year. So the three of us will be a full 1% of this year´s visitors. That´s cool. He also told us to use the GPS to get the location of any interesting prints we see (Huemel deer, puma) or any other interesting critters -- apparently a new species of frog was discovered there only last year. Anyway, I´ll have more to update on in a week.
love mack