Los Perdidos

We have this game that we play at home when we get bored. It usually starts at the point in the night when we've gone out to dinner, crossed town to get dessert, but still don't want to go home. We don't want to go home so we drive. The goal is to get lost in the city, but in our tiny mid-west excuse for a metropolis it's not possible. No matter what combination of left, right, center we choose, we always end up somewhere we recognize. Sometimes we discuss the fact that we can't get lost because we're not trying to get anywhere.

Ecuador is a different story.

On Sunday morning we got up at 4 a.m. to hike up Imbabura, a volcano an hour away from Otavalo. It was intense five hour climb to the summit, and I didn't even make it all the way up because several meters from the top I realized that I'm terrified of heights. Me and two other girls headed back down on our own, winding our way through the rain and the mud to the bottom, relying on our memory to get us there.

But three other volunteers who did make it all the way up to the top weren't nearly as successful in their solo attempt at descent. They took a wrong turn and headed down the wrong side of the mountain.

Of course, we didn't know this. Come Monday morning, we just knew that they were missing. The usual hostel routine--morning run, some joyful meals, lesson planning--went out the window as we put all of our resources towards finding our friends. We called parents and embassies and all of our high up connections. We ate our meals in silence. Instead of copying worksheets and test papers at the corner paper store, we photocopied fliers with pictures of our missing friends.

A group of girls took a taxi to the base of the mountain and showed the pictures around some of the smaller villages, hoping that our friends had managed to spend the night somewhere, a much nicer scenario to imagine than a scene of them sleeping in the woods.

The girls found them around seven o'clock on Monday night. Some random hikers had helped them out of the forest, and then the girls spotted them out on the road. They drove up to the hostel, honking all the way. We shared hugs and stories.

As it turns out, we had been far more worried than the hikers. They had spent their lost hours singing relevant songs (such as Destiny's Child's Survivor), debating when they would be found, and wondering what they would do when they got back. They had an adventure; we whiled away the hours waiting.