"Treat" of the week

Staying with the theme of my posts the "treat" of the week is coming from my time in Chile. A lot of my experience in Chile was tainted by the lack of organization and thorough planning by the lodge itself. For starters I arrived in Chile on the third of December, and I didn't see the lodge until just after Christmas. What was I doing that whole time? I was stuck in the basement of the lodge owners house in town stranded because of a lack of a vehicle forced to hike everywhere I wanted to fish, which didn't leave many options. I missed my birthday, I missed christmas, and new years before I even started working. Our first clients of the season came on January ninth in all that time we, Sam and I, still hadn't even seen one of the sections of river we were going to float with clients. That stretch happened to include my first class three rapid run. On top of that our "guide shack," appropriately named of course, was just that a shack. It was made up of four plywood walls a plywood floor and a tin roof. No insulation, a barely functional stove, and more mice that one would ever want to see. Sam and I gutted the place virtually unaware of how dangerous and deadly the hanta virus was without so much as a surgeons mask. We had to scour the area to find carpet so we didn't get splinters from our own floor. We put up a clothes line, cleaned the shelving system made a tying bench and created a screen for our window to keep the horseflies out. All this was done in our spare time after we were done working for the day simply so we would feel comfortable living there and not disgusted by the fact that we lived in a rat infested box. So all you future guides working for this establishment be thankful that we took that time to improve your living quarters because the guides before us didn't do us any favors.