testmeat photoblog

you know how sometimes you have days where seemingly nothing goes right? well 11/11/11 was like that for me. i was in a small town called huancabamba (stop sniggering at the back) and had intended to go to a smaller village harmonically named salala and hike to a sacred lake. it's fair to say that didn't go to plan, and my day was littered with small annoyances which individually weren't too bad, but combined together created a pissed off tim. in honour of the symmetrical date, here are 11 of them:

1. i woke up to very, very heavy rain
2. the 2 banks in the village wouldn't accept my cards, so had to survive on the very little money i had in my pocket
3. i had to wait over an hour in the rain for a taxi, and then had to pay twice the regular price for the journey
4. i unintentionally tipped the driver by leaving my bottle of water in the back, leaving me with half a bottle of coke for the lengthy trek
5. oh, and i also had no food save for 2 small breadrolls and 4 small cookies
6. during the walk i got lost at least twice, both times incorrectly walking too far up a very steep hill.
7. a stick i'd found and fashioned into a walking aid broke in two resulting in me slipping and falling into a pile of mud
8. most of the locals i met who were friendly at first gradually turned into intense drunken characters. you could smell the alcohol coming out of their pores and they were genuinely scary
9. after another long wait for a return taxi the driver vehemently insisted that i not put on my seat belt when i reached for it, and then drove unnecessarily dangerously, almost as if to punish my cautiousness
10. when i got back to my accommodation my old room was occupied, and all that was available was a room at twice the price
11. oh, and after walking for over 7 hours i never managed to find the fucking lake

there were many more little things that went wrong. in fact what i thought summed up the day was when i accidentally dropped the lid of my coke bottle into the muddy ground below. it landed face up (the good way up) and i thought - huh, maybe this day is turning around. i then fumbled picking it up and it fell again, this time landing face down. i took my camera with me, but despite the admittedly pretty landscape i didn't once take it out of my bag. i wasn't in the mood to capture, or appreciate, the beauty around me. so this is a slightly abstract shot taken on a far more successful hike when i was in huaraz

here's the original