mardi 9 septembre 2008

Day IV - “Did you know that the Virgin Mary was Jewish?”

Quelle temperature de meeeeeeerde!

Cold (frette, even), more wind than yesterday (to the point we wondered about admit to being windbound), rainy… a full package-deal for a pneumonia, the flu, hypothermia, scurvy, or all of the above.

We woke up after a semi-voluntary sleep-in and decided to treat ourselves with a cold breakfast since building a fire wasn’t an option. It took a long time to finally get on the water. The cold impaired most of our activities; it was impossible to stop for more than 5 minutes without showing early signs of hypothermia. Marilyne’s broom dance and the Haitian foot game I learned in cégep helped a bit to compensate for my Raynaud’s syndrome. As we munched on the “Morning in Puerto Limón” granola, I wondered if there was any place in the world that was more different to Costa Rica than right here. We finally made it to our day-2 campsite. We first found an old, eerie-looking cabin filled with bats and surrounded by moose crap, but after a few minutes of bushwhacking we found the “good site” promised by the map. It stopped raining as we set up the campsite, but we still had to use white gas to start a fire.


This afternoon Marcus and I went to check out the surrounding hills and lake as the kids hung out under the safety of the blue tarp. We found wild cranberries, bear crap and animal tracks. The view was gorgeous and imposing. It’s very different from the Rupert. There the landscape was threatening and hostile, reminding us that we didn’t belong, that humans weren’t supposed to be here. Here on the Moisie you still don’t feel like you’re in a familiar place (you’re pretty much on another planet), but the landscape is majestic, unreal. You feel like you are in a postcard or in a calendar picture.




We saw a weird bird by the campsite.

We left the kids deal with dinner while we sat in our tent and made fun of my German activity book. Every now and then we’d giggle at talks about Harry Potter conspiracies or random statements about Jewish religion caught from the kids' conversations around the firepit. Dinner was bland and unsatisfying. Thanks God I wasn’t hungry in the first place. They really need to figure out spices and cooking in general or else this is going to be a long 21 days.


We thought we saw Northern Lights but the spectacular show we saw from the bus the other night never came back and we went to bed disappointed. Too bad.

La nature est une agace-pissette parfois.

Aucun commentaire: