11/15/08

This morning I got up and went on a hike with Thom. We were only gone for about two hours, but it was a great time and some good exercise. We took taxis to the bottom of the hill that we were going to hike up. As we were riding along, we passed by a man who was pushing a wheelbarrow. I glanced over and noticed that he had an entire rack of ribs from what appeared to be a cow. I couldn’t imagine putting any type of meat inside a wheelbarrow to cart around let alone meat that is not wrapped in anything. The freshly butchered and skinned rack of ribs were just set inside without any type of covering. Not but a few minutes went by and we passed by where it must have been butchered, because the remains were hanging from a tree. The insides were hanging and as I looked over I noticed a lady examining the liver as if she wanted it. It was quite a site.

A few minutes later, before we really got to hiking we passed buy a guy who works at Sonlight. My memory is failing me and I cannot remember his name since I don’t work with him and he is normally out on the construction site. In any case, we stopped to talk to him and he said that he wanted to show us his garden. We said we would like to so he took us over to see it. I was impressed because instead of having a small garden, he showed us about at least half an acre of land where he had plenty of banana trees growing. He also had a mango tree, orange tree, bread fruit tree and a few others. It was pretty interesting to see.

After leaving the garden, we started on the hike which was very peaceful. Once we arrived at the top we sat and looked around at the beautiful view. You can see all of Port-de-Paix as well as the ocean and Tortuga, an island which is only about 6 miles out. We also sat and watched a US coast guard boat go past which was probably just looking out for drug trafficking. I hope to go on hikes more often and will have to take my camera since I forgot it to day.