|
We were hoping to start walkin early, but as fate has it there was more involved. It's a simple concept-getting porters to carry gear-but that is on the surface. Everybody wants a piece of the pie, but they want to cut their own piece. If one guy wants a job-good-but he might not work if you don't hire his 2 buddies. Then you need to hire people from all the villages along the way. Everyone wants extra money for something. It's a very complicated process to hire 30 porters, but we finally got off. Lucky for us; a group earlier this year was stuck for 3 days. So we started off with a veritable army: 30 porters, 3 army guys, 3 policemen, and 5 hunters apparently needed for passing through the more hostile villages. This was a little unnerving when hiking through primeval territory. With a little work and a lot of bribing and hassling, we made it to the final village, our stop for the night. We were surrounded by people with bone necklaces and penis gourds as we set up our tents. Then the rain started. It was pissing on us, buckets and buckets just kept coming down.
|
