At least the view is beautiful!

So I have shockingly little to report since my last entry. What started out as a promising week quickly changed when I again fell victim to the Peruvian weight-loss plan and had to abandon several scheduled visits into the field. Once back on my feet I spent the whole time trying to reconnect with the folks I had to ditch earlier in the week, a seemingly impossible task. After practically forcing a poor social worker from a town over to meet me at her house on Friday night to talk about how she can help me (yeah, really ridiculous) I proceeded to get terribly lost in her neighborhood and had to call her a million times to help get me there. The damn street numbers went from 200s to 800s to 500s back to 200s then 800s again...absolutely impossible. Thankfully she is a sweetheart, and even better, was excited to have me work in her field site since she is being moved to more desk-based work. I am going there on my own this week sometime and she is taking me on Saturday to see what her work has been about: ecological bathrooms, which I think is a septic type set-up, but I'll let you know.

The Huascaran National Park Office is being surprisingly helpful. Fortunately, there is an ulterior motive...one park officer has been selected by Fulbright Peru to do master's work in the U.S. and his English is not quite up to speed. We quickly agreed that I would help him in exchange for his help with finding a research site. They are taking me to a site on the other side of the Andes this week, which is said to be beautiful and very friendly, a killer field work combination if you ask me.

After banging my head against the wall with my other contacts, I reached deep into my bag and emailed a high mountain guide that a friend from last year suggested. The guides, especially the high mountain guides, really are pieces of work egotistically so I was not super keen on going to them, but was feeling a bit backed into a corner. He turns out to be very friendly, keen on the project, speaks Quechua, and on top of it all, has done high mountain treks with Lonnie Thompson, a big time glaciologist who works in the Andes on tracking glacial loss. It is a rather perfect fit and we are going to check out some sites nearby this week. Depending on how those go, I will probably hire him to take me to some sites quite a ways north this weekend.

I really, really hope to make the decision on where to spend the next 10 months of my life this weekend and actually move my butt up there early next week. However, time lines such as these are not my friend lately so we will see how it goes...I keep telling myself that at least the view in the meantime is beautiful.