Cie

CieSince we had only eaten almonds and we grabbed a banana after the treacherous climb, we decided to go to our hostel to eat and shower. This was at 5:00. We checked in, and for being at the top of a mountain, the hostel was really clean. The staff did not speak very good English, but it was good enough. We ordered food immediately and sat and waited. We ended up waiting for 4 hours. We asked over and over and over again and the response was always: "one moment" or "just a few moments." Finally, the man told us that the water was broken, so not only could we not eat, we couldn't shower either. Let's put this into perspective: We had literally eaten nuts and berries (the banana) all day long.


We're starving. We had been up since 7am. We had been hiking around the mountain, up and down stairs, in the sticky, hot sun. To say that we were smelly is an understatement. We were foul. Now, we are in a hostel where we cannot get food nor can we shower. HA! Just another part of the trip that isn't going right. Of course, we all sat and laughed hysterically while half crying. Luckily, they still had some thermoses filled with hot water, so we bought some noodles, and that was our dinner. At this rate, we were on schedule to loose a lot of weight this trip. As we were sitting in the lobby, I looked up and spotted an enormous spider. I'm talking tarantula-like. The body of this thing was almost as big as a sand dollar. Then add the legs...Oh my goodness. Just thinking about it while writing this makes me cringe. Before Geoff or Jacob could make an attempt to kill it with a magazine, it had moved across the room positioning itself high enough to be outside of anyone's reach. By this time, I was climbing across the tables and couches to be as far away from it as possible. The other Chinese workers sitting in the lobby did not even seem phased by the spider or by me acting like a nut--climbing around in a fit of hysterics. The more I watched it moved, the harder it was for me to breath, and the closer my knees came to locking and me to crying.



I started pointing to the spider and with hand gestures, I was asking the Chinese men to kill this huge thing. Casually, one of the men got up, got bug spray, and sprayed the arachnid. He did not use enough. Although it fell off the wall, it was running in my direction. Immediately, I was moving further and further away while simultaneously fighting the tears that had welled up in my eyes from streaming down my face. Eventually the spider lost against the homo sapien, but it gave a pretty good fight. Going to bed this night was not easy for any of us. Geoff had a nightmare, Jacob kept believing that spiders were crawling on him, I had convinced myself that the dead spiders sibling was going to end up in bed with me, and Molly just couldn't sleep. On top of it, we were all stinky and sweaty from not showering. Who can sleep like that?

Cie