24 January 2012
Copacabana, Bolivia
Well today was suppose to be our ultimate chill day. Do a whole lot of nothing. Maybe some emailing and chillaxing. There is a nice steep hillside next to town with what looks like a good over look on top. Should we ride our bikes up there, or take the trail. Well our legs need some work so we decide to go for a nice little hike. Its maybe 1000ft. up. The bottom portion of the trail does have some nice eucalyptus trees that smell amazing. We break out of the trees and Camille says to me”Wow! it looks pretty steep”, but its nothing that we haven't done before.
Once we reached about half way up the hill side we stop to take a breather. then we hear someone yell out from the top. Then hear some rocks starting to fall in our direction. We look up the hill and to our disbelief there is a guy cartwheeling down the mountain. Surely he’s going to stop. NOT!! He keeps tumbling, and tumbling, and tumbling. This is not a grass hill, or a dirt hillside. The hill was steep and full of very large boulders and rocks everywhere. The guy was coming straight at us. He finally came to a stop about 40 feet up from us. Holy Shit. We are definitely going to be the first people on the scene. As I'm running up to him I’m thinking “oh my God what am I going to do?” We run up to him and he is face down with blood everywhere. The first thing I do is check that he is still breathing. He is so CPR is out. He’s moaning so I think that’s good. His head is cut open in several places,his arms bleeding, his nose is bleeding, and it looks like his right arm is broken. I didn’t want to move him but he was really close to falling further down the cliff. So I just make sure he doesn’t roll over. The crowd from the top was yelling down to me”is he ok”. No of course he is not we need help down here. Soon what looked like his daughter and some other ladies came down. I gave him some of my water and he was drinking. That’s also good I thought. We then were able to move him away from the ledge and he sat up. He didn’t look good and I wasn’t sure how the hell we were going to now get him out of here.
Luckily there was a military marine base right at the bottom of the hill. I looked at the ladies as they were screaming for help and ask them if they wanted me to run down for help. They all said yes!! I ran down and met with the marines at the bottom. Quickly I told them the story in broken English and sign language. One of them had a stretcher and gestured do I need this. I said yes yes. I pointed to the area where he was and it was now out of my hands. We watched them carry him down with my monocular from our room balcony. Not sure how he was, but they loaded him in back of a truck and off they went.
What a nice relaxing day we had. A few shots of scotch and a bottle of wine helped out at the end of the day.
The HILL. He was at the top left and bounce about half way down.
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