Hey friends, how have you been?
You know that last weekend I had to go to collect some samples for an activity of my university, I need sample plants to make a herbarium, where we will locate specimens at random and according to their characteristics we must find the family to which they belong. So I went with 2 colleagues to collect these samples in a town near my city, we also went to a series of natural water wells called "La olla" and "La ollita", a place very visited by tourists on weekends, as they make a walk from the road to the forest of about 1h, 30 min or maximum 2h.
On Saturday I went alone to another field where my family has pineapple crops, and on Sunday I went with my companions to the river, I will only focus on Sunday because on Saturday too many things happened, I had an accident on the road (the central axle of the bike broke), after repairing it I continued my way, I fell on the way, on the way back it rained and I got wet everything, the truth is a disaster and it is a very long story.
But I will leave you some pictures of my Saturday, where I collected very small pineapple flowers, just a little after being pollinated, this we needed to study the bromeliad family which is the pineapple family.
Now the interesting thing, on Sunday we went to the area of Camoruco, a rural town that is about 30min from my city, this is where the road to the forest begins, in this place there are rails of the old train that connected cities, from this point begins the hike. I had approximately 5 years without visiting this place, since I went when I was just entering the university and in the hiking club, this was like a practice for us.
It was about 9 am and obviously the motorcycle road is much shorter, however it is very changed, there is no longer a road for vehicles, since the rain literally erased it, it is only a motorcycle road, the road is in super bad condition.
We stopped before starting to climb to check any details, because we did not want to fall here, plus the stop was to see a little plant species in the area and choose which one we were going to choose.
The boys stopped to pick their species, not knowing the family but knowing a little of the characteristics we saw in class, this should be pressed and made into a data sheet. After this we continued to the farm of a friend of the university and went to see his cocoa crop.
My classmate Javier almost fell down because he was a clown, that was the funniest moment of the whole thing.
Apparently in this plantation there are more than 1500 cocoa plants, criollo and Brazilian cocoa, and Javier is an expert in cocoa so we nicknamed him Willy Wonka, he looked for some specimens, explained a little about cocoa and we walked through the plantation, literally something new for me, besides tasting the dry cocoa without processing, the fruit has a bitter taste and this is due to the tannins, the criollo cocoa has a nutty flavor and this is because it has less tannins.
Here we start walking towards the river, the first well is called "La ollita", we only get here for the other one is much farther and it is still about an hour walk. The river of course is crystal clear, it is the source of the mountain and the water is very cold, we walked a little more than 15min to the place and for the big wells another 5min, there were some cyclists there, so we went to a smaller one.
We were here 1h resting, took a bath and talked about how to save the semester the last 2 weeks of classes haha.
The last stretch was to look for the samples in the forest, and we walked back to the place where we left the motorcycles. The plan for this weekend is to return again to look for other species, but we agreed to go to another river in another place to go on route as we did, that is to say, more companions and more motorcycles to get to know another magical place.
See you next weekend.