mud and canoes

I used to go canoeing...a lot. And I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much that I still want to write about it and compare it to my life in Vanuatu. So here goes...

When canoeing a river that is at or above your ability levels, it is easy to tell how comfortable you were on the river. At the end of the day, if your forearms are sore, it indicates, simply, that you had a death grip on your paddle all day. The sorer your forearms, the greater the intensity of your death grip. Thus very sore forearms are an indication that you spent most of the day being frightened by the river.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, Pentecost is a hilly island, to get most places involves walking up and down hills. To get to any place besides a few nearby villages requires walking up and down steep hills. Along with the hills, the soil seems to have a high clay content and it rains a lot here, like a lot. Steep hillsides of wet clay are virtually impossible to navigate for myself, Alex or anyone that hasn't grown up walking up and down them.

Yesterday I joined a group of men who are beginning construction on a new village meeting place (a village of one family, men from nearby villages (several of which are also villages of one family) are assisting with the construction project). Yesterday's work was to collect long, thin bamboo trunks for roof construction. It was probably a 20 minute walk to the village and then maybe another 40 or 50 minutes to where we harvested the bamboo. The return walk took a bit longer as we were carrying bamboo. Both of these walks had very steep parts and, of course, it was raining yesterday.

At the end of the day my leg muscles ached, very sore. A clear indicator I spent the entire day thinking I was about to fall down.