The cloud forest

Today was our first in La Libertad and in the morning we went exploring. Up over the pasture hugging the hillside scuffling upwards side legged like crabs. The hillside we climb, all the hillsides here are full of ancient history, ancient relics of the Canari. Mysterious pockmarked boulders jutting out of the pasture and mortar-pestle stones just lying silent in the grass. This landscape at some point around the conquest of the Incas some 600 years ago was far more densely populated than it is today. Following the Spanish conquest and the subsequent decline of the indigenous peoples of the Americas the forests advanced. Over the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st the forests retreats again with new farms and homesteads spreading out across the eastern slopes. Ebbs and flows like a tide of history written across the landscape.

Stumbling and maneuvering through the tangle of the cloud forest on the ridgeline it is dense, dank, and dripping wet. Clothed in vegetation over every surface on top of itself. Species over species, layer upon layers of fecundity. Were on our way to a huge old Podocarpus giant drooping with epiphytes and wild orchids. Were hoping to climb this old grandfather of a tree by rope and harness for an eye to eye look at the bounty of the boughs above.

An old rope ladder hangs down from the platform above and it begins to rain, a chilly cold rain as we wait there. The big limb above is covered so thick in its own living sweater of moss and ghost white orchid roots we cannot maneuver our tie rope over. After a while we decide to come back another day. Meanwhile there are many other things to do. Orchids hiding under ferns , frogs waiting to be discovered, and little woodstar hummingbirds to be glimpsed. A walk in the woods.