Mountains

We went hiking up one of the hills south of La Vaquita looking for phone reception. We ended up going to the very top, which wore me out. The geography and the plants I saw reminded me of the Wichita mountains in Oklahoma (except the plants are stranger). There were huge prickly pear trees (with bark and everything). The rocks were interesting too; some of them were bright purple and some looked volcanic (I have no idea what they were though). The top of the hill we went up was a flat plane with these strange cacti. We ended up not getting any phone signal, though, so we had to come back.

(Note from Steve: The date on my camera is a little bit off so ignore the time stamps in my pictures)

Photo of what La Vaquita looks like from above.

Photo of the top of the mesa, which was flat and had less vegetation.

Photo of what some of the fields (low by the river, the arroyo) look like from the mesa.

We ended up going to another hill to try to find phone signal (a little one called La Vaquita, with a big cross, by the entrance to the town). We still had no luck. We did meet a nice woman who was tending goats. She told us that women spend about 7 hours (from noon until 7 PM) tending to cattle, goats, etc. when they walk with them. I can't imagine doing that every day, especially if I didn't have a book to read. But the women tell me that they really enjoy liking in the campo.

We saw where the town water comes from. It's piped from a deep well in the direction of Estrella to the La Vaquita hill (to a reservoir there), then it comes down in pipes to black barrels placed around La Vaquita (on top of peoples' houses). Right now it's broken because the pump isn't working and needs to get replaced, so people are getting water from other sources (for instance, the river or another of the couple wells in the town) or driving to the well and getting the water directly from it.