Preparation for Rio Chonta

I have been on Mexico for about 4 months now and had a great opportunity to go on an overnight trip hiking through a cave with a river going through it. Every year a large group of guys embark on this interesting tradition. This year, my friend Fernando, who went for the first time last year, invited me along.

We spent two weeks getting together all the gear we needed, metal framed backpack, a large aluminum can, boots, hard hat, head lamp, quick drying pants, and the huevos to do it. Of course I didn’t have everything until the last minute, I had a problem finding boots because I was pretty much going to use them for this trip and that’s all, there isn’t much need for boots here. I wanted decent ones but I didn’t want to pay a lot for them. At first I wanted to get waterproof ones but I couldn’t find any under 1,000 pesos ($100) which were to much for my blood, so I ended up getting some for $320 Pesos at a work wear shop that ended up to work fine. They were hurting my big toes at first but that always happens when I get new boots, once we got in the water they stretched out and formed to my feet and were fine. The fact that they weren’t waterproof wasn’t a factor because our feet were frequently immersed all the way into the water so even if they were waterproof my feet would still have gotten wet.

Fernando picked my up around 8pm of Friday night. We were to stay in Mexico City for the night and the bus to the caves was to leave at 7:30am the next morning. Fernando’s family drove with us to Mexico City to stay at his Mothers place, then we went to his compañero (best friend) Hector’s house for the night who was also going for his third year straight. Once we got there, we went shopping for food and last minute supplies and went for dinner. We went to a small Taco place, just a little bigger than a stand but only because it had a permanent residence in a building with sidewalk seating. It was called “Tacos de Ramon” and their specialty was tacos cochillos. I was a little hesitant at first to try them because the word cochillo or cochino means dirty or nasty, but in the case of tacos, it is named that because they put a lot of different things in them, pork, onion, chicharrones (pork rines), and the rest of the crumbs that were on the stove. Hector’s wife was also hesitant due to the name, she has never had them before, she ended up getting a different kind of taco.
The place seemed like it would be good because it was super busy and it took us about a half hour to get a table, and another half hour to get it cleaned. Hector told me a joke about service: There were three men at a bar talking about their sons. One man says that his son is going to be an architect, the other men asked why, and he said because he is always building things and is really good at geometry and engineering. The second man says that his son is going to be a Doctor, and the other men again ask why, he says that he has always had an interest in the body and how it works and is excelling in the sciences. The last man says that his son is going to be a waiter…..confused the other men ask why, the man says that it is because he never listens to what he asks him to do! Kind of corny but it fit the scene because we were waiting forever for our table to get cleaned and we yelled for the dude like a hundred times and e kept saying “uno momento,” I will give it to him that they were extremely busy and there were other people ahead of us waiting for the same thing.

So after dinner we went back to Hector’s house and hung out packing our gear for the weekend while having a couple beers. We had a couple cigarettes as well but imagine a tiny apartment, half the size of my old apartment in Downtown GR, with no ventilation, three people smoking…it wasn’t pleasant, plus all my stuff for the weekend reeked of smoke. We put our clothes for sleeping into plastic bags as a second wall towards water (the aluminum can was the first defense, it was formerly a container for paint thinner that had a good and tight seal at the top to keep out water), food (bread, ham, carrots, snack bars, chocolate; Fernando and Hector HAD to have mayo, mustard, and chiles for their sandwiches, I told them that we are camping and that we should only take the necessities, they said that those are necessities), extra batteries, water, Gatorade, and extra rope and tape. We had to wrap our sleeping bags in plastic as well because they were to be on top of out can and exposed to water. Once everything was ready, we had a few more beers and played some cool new poker type games but instead of using money we used little balls of toilet paper, next thing I knew it was almost 4am, so we went to bed.