Walking4Water

Our navigation system doesn’t really mark roads according to names like, ‘MR1’ or ‘Ave Mao Tse Tung’, instead it marks ‘Deep Sand’, ‘Tar’, ‘Bad Road’, etc. So we knew we had a few days of ‘deep sand’ ahead of us. Unfortunately, the “deep sand” days also came the day after my tennis shoes disappeared off the top of the Land Rover. Luckily, Marty had his hiking boots with him that he rarely used, so I at least had usable shoes even though I felt like I had clown feet. Unfortunately, this also came at the time where I somehow acquired no less than 150 sand fly bites on my feet. But luckily, halfway through our ‘deep sand’ days, we were also given a place to stay at Marimba Secret Gardens ( http://www.marimba.ch/ -more on them later). Although at the time, one of the owners of Marimba was hospitalized because she had a sand fly lay eggs inside her skin and it got infected. That made me a bit nervous. But a steady regimen of Ibuprofen and Vaseline cured me within a few days. Gosh my feet looked awful. And ‘deep sand’ roads are really a workout! We were only a few miles from the ocean but could not see it at all from where we were walking. One night we found a campsite we thought was in the middle of nowhere, but a women came with her machete and children to help us chop firewood, and later in the night her husband came back with Thr kids to show us two conch snails he had caught. Although a little creepy he came to find us at night, the shells were amazing! We were pretty far from civilization so when we would walk through villages, the local people looked quite surprised to see us. It was an interesting few days!