1/15/2000

As the island of came into sight I waited with anticipation as we came closer. When we finally reached the island I couldn't stop myself from glaring out the small window. I couldn't believe what I was seeing , everything was so beautiful. The oceans were clear as glass, the forest was like a think blanket of green, and the houses were scattered across the island. When the air plain was approaching the runway my heart pounded with excitement and curiosity, and the plane was shaking quite vigorously as well. When the plain touched down I just wanted it to stop because I couldn't wait to get out and start to explore. When I first set foot on this new soil the only thing in my mind was, "It's hot here!" We quickly made it through customs and onto our bus. The ride up to the house was a lot longer than originally imagined, although it was quite interesting to see the island and how the people lived. As we slowly crawled across the island I noticed that the people here did not live very rich lives. Most were in shacks wearing ragged clothing.

When we finally reached the house I looked at it in wonder. When the van stopped I grabbed my luggage and darted for the rooms, when I was caught up by the unbelievable view of ocean and the surrounding land. As the night neared I became weary from the long trip, and the fact that I had to wake up at 2:00 am. I just thought to myself when I was laying in bed, "I can't wait to see what this island has to offer."

1/21/00

The Big Hike: Boiling Lake

The morning started out as usual with Mr. Leonhardt pounding on our door saying, "Get up! Boiling lake! Get up!" Everybody slowly rolled out of bed and ran their usual morning routines. I just got out of bed, put a shirt on and went right over for breakfast. It is always better to be early for breakfast rather than late, if you are late you don't get any food. Once I made it up to the house I saw that the breakfast wasn't ready yet so I decided to have some coffee, this was due to the late night that I had because people couldn't get their work done quick enough. Eventually everybody arrived at the table, and the food was brought out. Today it was fruit, biscuits, and some sausage. We all quickly ate and then ventured back to the house to get our gear ready for the hike. Little did we know there was a surprise waiting for us, the main door had been closed and the doorknob didn't work. We initially thought that the lock on the door had gotten stuck so we walked around to the other side of our rooms, looking for an alternate way to enter, when we inadvertently saw that both locks on the door were open. By this time Mr. Leonhardt had become inpatient with us and decided to wander down to see what the delay was all about. Once he saw us locked out he told Hoffy to go and get somebody from the house to come and help us. We kept trying to open the door but had minimal success. Eventually a man came down and was looking at the lock, he had no idea what was going on. By this time Mr. Leonhardt, only getting two hours of sleep the night before, was getting frustrated and began to pound on the door with a lot of rage. We thought that we were going to have to knock the door down, so Corey was called to come and charge at the door. Right before he went to ram the door Mr. Leonhardt touched the lock and it opened. Rather odd, don't you think? So we quickly went in and got our gear and got out. We all piled on to Klem's buss and we were on our way. The trip to the site was really short, so we didn't have a lot of time to pray for our lives. Finally we arrived at what most people thought was going to be a trip to hell, and for some back.

The hike started out with a picture of the group before the stroll, then we readily made our way to the starting point. Once we reached the hut where the trail stared we took notice too many surrounding signs that said thing like: "What come around goes around," "Everyone will die," and other odd things. So naturally everybody was a little timid, but that wasn't going to stop us. The trail started out with some stone steps and quickly changed to the logs laid across a muddy path. Even thought it had rained the night before it wasn't as muddy as I thought it was going to be. The beginning of the walk quickly turned into twenty minutes ago, and then forty minutes ago. The time and the distance were increasing quickly. So far the hike proved no real challenge. Quickly we reached the highest point of the hike, and from here you could see over the entire trail. And you could see that we still had a long way to go. The rest of the hike felt like it was a breeze, until we reached the valley of desolation. The drop was almost straight down and we had to make our way down it. All that I could think about was how we had to come back up that during our return home. Once we got down into the valley I took a deep breath and found out that I didn't want it. The air was so full of sulfur that it smelled like the aftermath of a bake bean convention. We then got our first view of some heated streams. The trip through this area was made as quickly as possible, and before we knew it we were there. It was really hard to see the lake because it was covered with a thick smoke from the heat. But whenever a gust of wind came by we could get a good look at the lake, and saw that there was a large bubble of heat in the middle of the lake. Everybody saw it and that was it, we turned our backs and ate our lunches. When we were done eating we got our bags together and started walking back. Our journey home was really fast, we had a record breaking time of one hour and fifty minutes. When we reached the hut that we started at we went around the corner and just dove into the gorge, which was filled with water. It was the perfect ending to a hike that was a lot more fun than it was pain.