Jesus is Watching.

DISCLAIMER: the following is not a joke... nor an infomercial.

Jesus is watching me. Literally.

I can feel his eyes on my back. i am chopping an eggplant on a worn plastic blue plate scarred with old, deep scratches. the knife is dull and a bit rusty.

Lulu walks over and hands me an onion and a zucchini.

"Jesus Christ," she whispers. My eyes widen, I tilt my head towards the life-size picture of Jesus looking back at us with open palms and receiving arms. She glances at him, looks back at me, we look back at Jesus, shrug and say, "sorry?" This is followed by 30-minutes of uncontrollable laughter while Jesus watches on.

FACTS: (feel free to stop and take notes...)
it is Saturday night at 11:30pm and i am with a French, a Canadian, an Argentine, an Uruguayan, a drunken farmer and his son in a barren kitchen in an isolated church in the middle of a nowhere northern Argentina village at the bottom of a canyon with dried mud up to my knees and a thunderstorm crashing down aggressively outside....oh, and i'm making RATATOUILLE... naturally.

The drunken farmer, who rescued our little rental compact car just thirty minutes ago from the oatmeal-thick, soft-as-pudding-mud, wrestles with the neglected oven, attempting to light it up so we can start cooking the ratatouille... naturally. His eyes are red veins, but friendly. he coughs and the heavy spray of alcohol on his breath is sufficient to light the wheezing oven. who needs propane when you got whisky-cerveza flammable-grade breath? i plug my nose and continue chopping. The rain has ceased. My legs are itchy form the mud.

FLASHBACK:
Ten hours ago, i rented a compact car, a VW Gol i named "fuerte" (which looks like a VW rabbit but without the 'cool' factor. it's small. very small.) with a 6ft 3in Canadian named Stephen, and sassy, French Lulu. Stephen squishes into the driver's seat, knees scraping the steering wheel and we chug off towards Cafayete. enroute, we encounter 10 HOURS of the most phenomenal landscape show that mother nature ever directed. each turn on the dusty, rocky road revealed another breathtaking landscape. if mother nature ever had schizophrenia, this was the result of it. there were cactus forests that looked like a bunch of green alien nutcrackers standing at attention, at ease, and even, at play guarding the vast desert on the hood of the mountain. there were deep, grey-purple bruises on the mountain plains that ran down the green pastures like creases in the palm of your hands. there were mars-like canyon rocks that screamed of angry red and orange hues that only became more fired up as the sun danced across them. we gave ourselves whiplash tossing about in little 'fuerte' trying to take it all in. then mother nature took it up a notch... in the distance she seduced us with lightening bolts and a curtain of a storm way up high, on the rounded tips of the far away peaks, like a giant jellyfish in the sky. with a bulbous round head, the legs of rain touching ground, and electricity exploding within.

it was majestic.

until... 10:30pm, when all of a sudden as we skitted along the dark canyon road, twisting and turning like a restless cat, the road seemed to bleed mud and water towards us. stephen threw 'fuerte; in reverse, letting the water and mud chase us like lava.

"GO GO GO!!! OVER IT!!!!" i shouted, along with lulu. "FASTER FASTER FASTER!!!"

so we did. and fuerte bounced and found his inner 4x4 and took us over to the other side. within a minute, with our adrenaline still rushing, we found ourselves in yet ANOTHER bigger mudslide/ flash flood situation... stephen threw it into gear and fuerte lurched forward, over rocks, mud, branches... SCRAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!!!!

um, uh oh.

we got to other side, got out of fuerte and the back bumper was sadly clinging on by a mere screw on the left-side. it's pouring and the sound of a make-shift river can be heard in the distance. oh crap.
despite the situation at hand, lulu and i are in fits of giggles. stephen, though, is freaking out. what to do? keep the bumper or not to keep the bumper? keep the bumper or not to keep the bumper? ummmm, definitely keep the bumper. definitely. but we have no rope, wire or anything to tie it back in it's place. errrr.... not to keep the bumper?

then, light bulb... a caribeaner!

with a caribeaner, we magauyvered the bumber back in place (yeah we did!!), hopped in, started fuerte and took off... ONLY to get stuck 10 minutes later in mud so thick and so soft, it was like quick sand. we stepped out, immediately sinking to our knees in mud and realized pretty quickly that we were not going anywhere anytime soon.

ENTER: the drunken farmer and his son to help push us out, the isolated church that we happened to get stuck in front of that we took refuge in until morning, the kitchen in the church that we cooked the ratatouille in...

....and, of course, jesus, with his open palms and receiving arms to watch over us.

i turn and give him a wink, "muchas, muchas gracias..."