¨Oro¨ marks the spot

The rain continues unabated as I walk the short trail to our kitchen. I am bundled up from the wet cold here compounded by the thin air at 12,000ft. A breaffast of muesli and powered milk to start the day.

In the morning Coral led the students on a compass navigation lesson while I snuck away on a reconnaissance of sorts. Stowing a couple bars of chocolate, a lonely origami crane I found with nowhere to go, and a riddle to be found and solved. ?Oro?, gold marks the spot under a brilliant golden Asteraciae about 300m to the West of our camp. While Coral hiked to meet Patricio on a mission to fix the truck, now totally stranded at the bottom of a sopping wet muddy track a mile distant I set the students on a lesson in GPS navigation. The lure of a treasure hunt only an added bonus of persuasion.

The paramo is shrouded in ghostly white fog and cloudy mist, the tall tussocks of grass all bejeweled in rain drops and the spiky bursts of puya bushes sending up tall, alien, unworldly inflourencence flowers into the surreal landscape like a foggy memory of the Lorax incarnate straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. Eventually they found the treasure I planted, chocolate and all. Dividing up this black gold appropriately, fuel for the return ascent up the steep hill we climbed down. Stopping mid descent to reflect in the silence and enormity of the landscape, listening to the wind sing over the hilltop. What a long journey each drop of this fine drizzle has taken to arrive at just this point.

I made an assignment of treasure mapping to conclude the afternoon. Blending practice in good natural history observation along our route with each students creative ingenuity to imagine their own visional map. Like one of the half charted maps of old dotted with sea monsters and savages populating the unknown world. Coral will be our judge when she returns.

Meanwhile the rain continues to fall and the day quickly morphs into dusk as it so eruptly does here on the equator. Candles are lit to illuminate the gloom while the paramo frogs begin their nightly chorus as the drizzle continues to fall outside