The Longest Hike Ever

So I've survived day one of building our dam. And after the hike that we had I'm thinking that "survived" fits it pretty well. I met up with some guys this morning and we took off out to this remote village. I was kind of a last minute addition to the team and didn't really find out a lot of the details until today. Basically we're building a dam for a couple of gov't officials that live in our town. They are from this village and they don't have any water out there, so to help them out, and to help us build some relationships with them, we have volunteered to build the dam. I'm going with a guy, C_, who is doing the same kind of thing I am but full time out here. We've also got three nationals going with us. One of them is the leader of a home c. The guy is pretty stinking impressive. I don't really understand much of what he says but he uses a lot of gestures and everyone is always laughing. The basic gist of the trip is that we drove out of town, spent another hour driving down a dirt road to a small village and then started hiking. The hike took a little under 5 hours to go the 10 miles. The first half of it wasn't so bad but the last half was brutal. Most of the trekking was on small mountain goat trails that were about 2 foot wide. On one side you had the mountain, and on the other there was a cliff. There were a few spots where we had to rock climb down and did a lot of sliding. At one point I made a comment to C_ that the guys we were going with must be half Sherpa and then he informed me that their people were actually from that region and were sort of related. So that figures. These guys were basically running down the sides of the mountains and we were just trying to keep up. The scenery was amazing, unfortunately I couldn't look at much of it for fear of falling off a cliff. I basically spent most of the trip looking about 3 feet in front of me and only looking up when we took a break. We dropped off our supplies and then hiked out and got to our village. The people we are staying with live right on the Yangtze River. It is pretty remote out here. Most of the people who live out in the villages are very poor, but these people are poorer than anyone else I've met. The lack of money is one of the reasons why they don't have any roads or ways to get to their village. They do have a little electricity which powers one light bulb that we hung outside of our room. Other than that, not much going on. One of the big things while we're out here is that we need the weather to hold up. It was a great day today, kind of hot (low 80's I think), but we need it to keep from raining. If it rains it'll make the trails pretty impossible to get across and also it'll mess up our plans to get out. I found out that the thing about leaving is that we can cut our hike down to about 4 miles and take a boat across the river and then just have a van pick us up at a hydroelectric plant. So that is best case scenario. When we got started the leader of the area said we couldn't take the boat because the rainy season has started and the river is too high, but the leader of the village we're in said it should be ok. So we're going to bed early, I've realized there isn't anything to do once it gets dark and you have no electricity, and then getting up and hiking to build our dam.