Black face in Los Llanos
The next day we drove a short way out of town to a festival celebrating the countries only black saint. For some reason this entailed blacking up, minstrel style and marching the streets shooting firework guns into the air. Quite entertaining, but not very PC. The guns were incredibly loud and the recoil enough to knock the smaller participants off their feet. The noise and smell were overwhelming and we slowly retreated back to the truck, as looking into the staging area we could see easily a thousand more people waiting to try and deafen us.
On the way back I got dragged into a doorway by a chap desperate to practice his English, and fed some of the local spirit, which turned out to be identical to Baileys. I bought a bottle off him for later, which may well have been his plan all along.
Further along the road we came upon the Black Lake, so called because it was a big pond, and quite dark in colour. After my cook group had prepared our lunch, most people set off to walk round it but I went to the local shops in search of a pillow for that evenings camping. Didn’t find one, but did get a very good cup of hot chocolate which was much appreciated given how cold it was at this altitude.
By the time we arrived at the campsite we were at 3800m and stupidly cold. Again luck was on our side and we were able to stay in bunk beds in the farm outhouses. These had broken wooden windows and undersized doors to let in extra draughts and were probably colder than getting in our sleeping bags in the tents, but warmed up after a while.
After a short trek to spot a rare duck, which seemed to be black and white with horns and say ‘Moo’ a lot, we made dinner and sat round an inadequate camp fire drinking very cold beer and going to the toilet a lot. Our new guide made lots of racist jokes which our Chinese member really didn’t appreciate so we all went to bed and shivered for about an hour until we felt it was time to get up.
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