Day Eighteen

Spent most of day working on the bamboo flooring on the first cabin. A pretty laborious process as most of the bark has to be stripped off. This is time-consuming process just re-affirms why we should not be building our structures too big. I once again voice this sentiment to the Repeator who boldly claims that it is of no matter and it will all work out. Suddenly, I don't trust myself around him with a machete.
Other bad news, the solar panels are only charging the motorcycle battery enough to in turn charge an IPOD for about 15-30 minutes daily. As this only leaves us with about 40 minutes of listening, we are very selective about when and what we listen to. Now I only have time to listen to the first half of Michael Bolton's Greatest Hits before I have to turn over the IPOD to Joe's music.
The night has become quite routinized--cook dinner, listen to music, talk, and turn in around what Joe and I originally thought was 10pm or so, but just realized when he looked at a clock that it was around 8:15pm. And so, contrary to how I believe I must look (havent seen a mirror in weeks), this 10 hours of nightly beauty sleep should have me emerging from the jungle as one helluva good lucking dude.
After dinner, we venture down to greet a German couple and their guides, who've just arrived from up river. We invite the couple up to our camp later to chat about the news from The Outside as they have recently came into the jungle and we are anxious to hear what's going on in the world. They were a really cool couple and Joe and I were cracking up at the idiosyncransies in their English langauge usage, especially his mix-up of the words "angry" and "afraid"--"I am very angry of the water!" They were astounded at the length of time we were spending in the jungle and made a promise that they would buy beer and have it sent downriver by their guides on their next expedition. We were excited by the prospect of a beer but did not want to get our hopes up by some off the cuff offer. Crossing our fingers....