First Trek

So like we said, it didn´t take us long to get set up with our first trek. A three day venture through the crater of Maragua, just a short distance outside of Sucre.  Our trek consisted of the two of us, along with our guide for the trek, Lisa, a fellow volunteer from England, and the ´Romanian Couple´.  It was a really good trek to get our feet wet with, and we had a great time with everyone we went with.  The Romanian couple we´re really enjoying themselves, we´re talking to the locals, taking massive amounts a pictures, and stopping to inspect every leaf or bush we came across.  Even at the time I had a sense they we´re the slowest hikers ever,  and after our nine full weeks with CT, the most absolutely were, some people move so slow that it´s literally unfathomable how they make it anywhere.  It was almost they had supernatural abilities, that´s how slow they were, and despite how much they stopped for pics, etc, and for breaks, it still didn´t explain just how they were able to achieve such a slow walk.  Anywho, aside from that it was really great first experience with CT.  We struck out on the first day of the trek at roughly 9AM and took a camion, which is pretty much just an animal trailer filled with locals, and whatever they have with them, out to the Virgen de Chataquilla.  This was a small church really just in the middle of nowhere, but had an interesting myth behind it´s naming.  The story goes that one of the builders of the church was a non-believer, and one day while taking a break a boulder fell just inches from where he was sitting, cracked open, and revealed the image of the Virgin.  He man thought nothing of it, just coincidence, at went to bed that night, tormented by visions of what had occurred earlier that day.  We woke up, and still though, there was no significance in any of it.  He returned to work the next day, and again while on his break another boulder crashes just inches from where he sitting, and reveals the image of the Virgin.  Still he is not convinced, just coincedence he believes, even after the visions haughnt him another night.  Yet still a non-believer, he returns to work and for the third day in a row, while lying down, a boulder comes chrashing down. Only this time it lands on him and breaks his leg, finally convincing him, that it´s perhaps more than just coincidence.  And apparently that is how the Church got its name.  From there the trek begins, which takes us down the Inca trail, which technically is just a pre-columbian trail as it can´t be confirmed that it was actually used by the Incas themselves.  Down the trail leads you to a valley, and village Chaunaka, where we spent our first night in a cute little community hostel.  It was a bit of a hassle just to get into our beds that night, as the family who holds onto the keys for the community hostel also try to rent rooms for the night out of their own house, and tells us they dont have keys to the hostel. This of course is all b.s. and we wait a few hours and finally a women comes down to give us the keys.  Then we ask for the mattresses that are supposed to be in the hostel as well, and she tells us that dont have any.  Again a few hours pass and then she tells us that she does in fact have a couple mattresses, I walk up to the house to grab, and find that of course she has a few, in fact, a whole room full of them.  But what can you do, you can´t blame them too much for trying to make a buck, which everyone for the most part is trying to do in Bolivia.  The next morning we wake up and head out along a trail that follows the riverbed, which at this point, barely had any water in it, but that changed in the following weeks, and it was quite an experience just to see the changes in the landscape over our two months trekking in the area.