Bosque del Amor

April 12

I know I come from a cold country and the temperature here shouldn’t bother me, but when the houses aren’t heated, it’s camping!  We buried ourselves under three extremely heavy alpaca wool blankets and were very warm.  We were also exhausted from the drive up so we slept well.

The effect of the altitude diminished somewhat and we decided we were up for a hike.  We were promised it didn’t include too much elevation gain, but it did involve jumping over some of the little streams that were running through the pastures we were hiking in.  The end point was the Bosque del Amor, the Forest of Love.  It’s a beautiful forest of karkoc trees which are on a natural weir for the lake above and thus have waterfalls running through them everywhere.  It’s a beautiful peaceful place.  The hike wasn’t that long or hard, but at this elevation we were still short of breath and were ready for a nap when we got back to the village.

Forest of Love - Bosque del Amor

In the evening, Dave had the first of a series of meetings with the members of the Artisanal Ecotourism Association of Vilca he his working with in this CESO assignment.  His purpose was to facilitate participatory workshops on values of forest conservation and sustainable ecotourism.