Day five of the race:

Since we all spent the night at different people’s places we all met at this restaurant for breakfast. Unfortunately we were not allowed to order for ourselves as the Brown’s had already ordered for us. I can’t remember the name of what we ate, but whatever it was it was weird. It looked like a pile of mush on our plates; it was ground beef, eggs, and mashed plantains. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t the best either. Also, it was very heavy and filling; I only ate a small amount of it because it was so filling. Besides, you don’t want to eat something that heavy before you have to begin a race. Today the teams were a bit different; instead of five teams of three, we had three teams of five. The teams were completely random, but somehow all of us Ecuadorian interns ended up on the same team (Julianne, Ben, Reese, Mandi, and myself). Our first challenge of the day was to find the outdoor market, find Señora Mercedes Ureta, who would give us some fruit to sell. We needed to sell $5 worth of fruit. We were given three boxes piled full of oranges, I think we were told that there were 40+ pieces of fruit per box. One box we sold for $2 and the other two boxes were sold for $1.50; what a good deal for so much fruit! We sold it all right away, but we ran into some guys at the bar and started to talk with them. They didn’t know any English, but Julianne and Ben translated for us. Símon and Fernando were there names, Simon owned the bar and Fernando was already drunk by 9 in the morning. Simon was excited and glad that we are here in his country serving. He told us to remember him and to come back and visit him if we were ever back in town (which we will be tomorrow night, so how knows, maybe we will be able to stop by and say hi). Fernando said some stuff to us, but Jules was having a hard time understanding him because he was slurring his words. Anyways we were able to pray for them before we left and Fernando turned around and prayed for us afterwards. It’s times like these when we forgot that we were in a race and took the time to get to know the people. We were probably there talking with them for about 20 or so minutes. After we prayed together we headed out back towards the market for our next clue. For our next clue we had to use this special paint (used by the Siccha Indians from Santo Domingo) to dye someone on our team’s hair. We dyed Ben’s hair because he didn’t care – the colour didn’t really show up anyways so it didn’t matter anyways. We then had to perform a song, along with a dance, that we had learned the previous night at Percy’s church. Thankfully someone on our team remembered the words because otherwise that would have been a problem. We had to dance in the middle of the market, so we had quite a crowd around us; crazy gringos =P. After that we had to get on yet another bus, this time to Guayaquil, once there we had to find the McDonald’s in the terminal (which was huge and looked like a mall) for our lunch and next clue. Part of getting our lunch consisted of running to the SuperMaxi (their version of Wal-Mart or something like that) and buying some pop and cups for the drive to the Peruvian border. We were the last team to leave the market and get to the bus station in Portoviejo, no team was allowed on the same bus as another so we assumed that we would just remain in last place. But somehow Julianne met this one guy who got us on the right bus that left Guayaquil earlier than the other buses. So we beat the other teams to Guayaquil by about 30 minutes. However, by the time we found the SuperMaxi and got our drinks the other teams had arrived. The line ups were huge so we paid someone at the front of the line to buy our stuff for us, that way we could remain in first. We got our lunch and then we had to find the TransForsur red vans to take us to the immigration office on the Ecuador side to get our passports stamped. We thought we figured out where to go, but turns out everyone we talked to lead us to where the buses left from, not to the parking lot where the vans were. By the time we figured out where to go the other teams had caught up and were all racing towards the vans. The drivers didn’t understand that it was a race and insisted that they wait until we ALL got there. Thankfully Rich was able to convince them otherwise – we ended up at the same gas station at the same time as everyone else so at that point we didn’t care about racing. We had to wait at that gas station for a bit because the white van that Inca Link owns broke down and we had to wait for the Brown’s and Gustavo to get to figure out what was happening. We eventually got to the office, got our passports stamped and then made it to this little bus station right on the border (we were still in Ecuador). We had to wait about an hour at this station for the leaders to get there, so we never really did finish the race for this day. Our leaders finally got there, we went out for supper and then got on a bus to take us across the border into Peru. From there I can’t quite remember what we did, all I know is that we got a private bus to take us to where we were spending the night. By the time we got there it was just after 11 pm (although it felt much, much later!). By this time it was already dark so we couldn’t really see where we staying, at first it didn’t look like anything special until we walked in. We stayed at this beautiful resort, with a pool in the center of the courtyard with the rooms wrapping around. It was so nice! We got our first clue for the next day when we got there, after we got organized into our rooms and figured out what was happening for breakfast. The resort we stayed at was in Mancora, Peru. We were so excited once we read our clue; it basically said that we were having a day of rest and we got to spend the day on the beach, it was lovely; so enjoyable and relaxing. I wish I had pictures of the resort and of the beach (I know Mandi has pictures up so I may have to steal some from her). Anyways, more later!