Lavena Coastal Walk/Bouma Falls

I am well aware that this is a horrible picture of me, but am hopeful it conveys my state of mind. Once there, the falls were beautiful and cold and refreshing, but we still had lunch and our return trip to face.

Thursday we set out to retry our trip to Lavena and Bouma. It was an overcast, but HOT and sticky day. We embarked upon the rocky road again for the longest ever one hour trip to Lavena. The river was within its banks and we crossed the bridge without event. Once at Lavena Village we paid our fee to walk on the beach--this is common when the land is owned by a village. As we walked out onto the white sandy beach we were looking forward to cooling off in the water and enjoying some beach time. But, almost immediately, we were accosted by black biting flies. They were literally swarming us and we didn't walk very far before we decided to once again abort our mission. After all that... it just wasn't worth it. SO, into the car we piled again and drove back to Bouma. From Bouma, the falls were just a 15 minute walk through a well worn path in the jungle. Liam had passed out asleep and I carried him heavily in the near 100% humidity to the falls. Once there, we all enjoyed cooling off, at least momentarily. We still had to drive home.

Before the drive home, however, we had arranged to have a woman in Bouma Village cook us lunch. She was a really sweet woman, but she made the most god awful curry we have ever tasted. She stayed to watch us eat (and insisted on holding Liam) and we stuffed down what we could.

After our exhausting day we decided today to take it easy, hence the pool pics below!

Tonight, we sat out and watched the stars for a bit. I have never seen so many before, it's awesome in the truest sense of the word. Over the past week we'd been debating about whether we were seeing shooting stars or airplanes high above. Finally tonight, we realized that they were satellites that we were seeing orbiting our planet each night. It was very cool, I had never seen that before and we see several each night here.