Sunday

This morning, Sunday, I woke up early and went to eat breakfast with the Oriente family. Marlene and I stayed with them when we were here in May and she lived with them for a long time when she first came to Mexico. Martha cooked a typically delicious breakfast, we talked, I gave them the gifts that Marlene and I got them, watched Cars with Davidcito, and then we all went to church together. When I first got to the Oriente house, baby Daniel was scared of me, but at church, he fell asleep in my arms and there he stayed for 2 hours. That was a gift. The sermon was excellent, called “The Test of Faith”. I think it was a continuation of a series and today he talked about how demons, second hand faith, and convenient faith can distract, hinder, and act as counterfeits to true faith in Jesus. After church a big group of us loaded into two cars and headed to a place in the mountains called Las Truchas, or the trouts. At the top of the mountain is a natural spring of water and a few of the locals have started trout farms by pulling water from the stream into big tanks. You pick the size of fish you want and then they either steam or fry it for you. It comes with a salad, tortillas, and rice. From where we parked the cars, it was about a 10 minute hike to the first trout farm and another 10 minutes to the second. We arrived very hungry to the second farm at about 3:30. Most of us hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but we decided to hike up to the spring before we ate. There is no fixed path so we ended up hopping rocks, hanging on vines, and getting pretty wet and muddy in the 20 minutes it took to get to the spring. It was absolutely beautiful! I had never seen anything like it. It actually looks like the water comes right out of the rock. The water is a bluish gray color, freezing cold, and tasted sweet. Arriving at the spring, we thought we had come to a dead end. All around were cliffs stretching way into the sky and there were thick vines hanging from ancient trees, giving everything a jungle feel. Irma and I were not content to end the day after only a 30 minute hike, so we coaxed some of the more adventurous guys to keep exploring with us. Passing a cave, we found some steep rocks with vines hanging over them and climbed straight up to the top of the cliff. From the top, it looked like we could get to the top of the mountain relatively easily, so off we went. Israel M., Victor, Lalo, Carlos, Javi and came along and we spent the next hour on our hands and knees trying not to fall back down the mountain. At the top, Javi told us that we needed to find a different way down, as that had been too dangerous. We all agreed. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a way back down. We tried going down four different ways and finally decided to try and find the stream and follow it. We found it, but it runs through boulders and down little cascades, so we got very wet and cold in the process only to arrive suddenly on a 300 foot waterfall drop to the spring where we had started. No way down. Climbing back up the mountain took us back to another dead end drop. At this point we were getting worried that it would soon be dark. After the first hour, we stopped hearing the others down below shouting for us and we stopped shouting back, concentrating only on finding a way down. Now we were wet, cold, very dirty, and our wet shoes made it difficult to not slip in the leaves and mud. We fell and slid and finally found a vine hanging over a steep drop. I was first in the exploration line, so I went down first. From the bottom I could see the spring so the others followed me and we ran to the spring to drink water. The others had long since left to go eat their trout, but they were happy to see us. Lalo’s mom was with us and they were all getting worried. I haven’t had so much fun in who knows how long. We all want to go back next Sunday…
We ordered our trout, played on the grass, and talked. Unfortunately, Carlos and Isra found out that a vital piece had fallen off of Isra’s car on the drive up, so we hauled water from the stream and the guys tried to diagnose the problem. After about half an hour we were on the road again, headed for warm showers, tea, and bed.