Teaching a child to play with fire

The Caura river was very very very long but extremly remote and not to forget beautiful river. We went about 300 kilometer up steam...5 hours of boat travel the first day and an 8 hour boat ride the second day to reach the nudist villages with plenty of participating members. At first I did some cheap looks and then after a while...I did more. It was nice to see that Direct TV has made it to this villages along the river. Powered by the generators, a quite a few huts had this basic nessicity for men....a TV that seemed to play either sports or music videos of women in bikinis as their topless wives were completely ignored as they did chores along the riverbanks.

Our guide brought her 5 year old daughter on the tour. It is nice that working moms can bring their children to work, fortunetly for me, making the trip even better. Everyone knew how to speak english, but they still spoke spanish most of the time. Good for learning spanish but hard to follow after a long day in the sun. But the 5 year olds vocabulary was much smaller than theirs but much greater than mine. Also...with kids, you really dont need to speak any language. For example, one night we had candles burning at the table and I taught the girl how to carelessly play with wax without saying anything. She stepped it up a notch when she grabbed some paper and lit it on fire, burning her fingers but showing no sign of lasting pain besides the first initial few seconds. I would have stopped her but I was so intranced in the fire, I thought it was a good idea, until I saw she was not going to let it go - remembering that she is only 5.

On the hike to the falls I was given the chef knife and it was not ment for cooking. I guess it was suppose to be use for chopping down overgrowth but the trail was really well used by the locals and there was no overgrowth until the last half hour of our 9 hour day. Looking at everyone on the trails...it seemed that they were all carrying some type of knife, ranging from the common little steak knife to the rare machettes. What good a small steak knife would do, I dont know but I truly enjoyed hiking up and down the trails swinging the knife like a wildman decappitating any dead branches, flowers or leaves that would stand in my way - telling myself I should grow up, but then ignoring what myself had to say.

This is another trip that I have so much to say, but it is not possible to do it in a reasonable amount of time. Too bad I can not make this blog a fulltime job. Anyhow, I am heading to a region on a night bus to explore the animal life in Los Llanos. I heard there were plenty of snakes to wrestle and hamster-like pigs. Hopefully no soup will be served out these or other potencially unusual wildlife treats.