A Wondrous Place

(No lyrics… but from Tarzan!)

Well guys it has been almost a month since I have written and I am sorry about the lack of posts, but life has been crazy and is just flying by. This day in 3 weeks I will be in Quito for my last few hours in this wonderful country I call home and then I will be heading off to enjoy the next adventure, reverse culture shock! No, but really, I am excited to go home and see everybody, but also very sad about the idea of leaving my family, friends, and life here in Ecuador. But you have all heard lots about my thoughts on coming home, so I wont bore you with those. Instead I will tell you of the most fantastic adventure I just had.

Last week I headed off on an AFS (my exchange program) trip to the amazon rain forest. The amazon has been something I have heard about since I was a little kid, about the animals that live there, the different layers of vegetation, and the amazing bio diversity that thrives within the small amount of land. This was a dream come true.

After spending the weekend in Quito doing various things from gift buying to cooking amazing food at our favorite little hostel we headed off at 11 pm on a bus buzzing with AFSers all speaking in different languages catching up on what life had been like for the past few months. The bus ride was about 9 hours long and it was mostly spend sleeping. When we arrived I was so excited and got even more excited when I saw what our form of transportation would be: motorized wooden canoes. We all put on our life jackets and scrambled in. The next two and half hours were spent floating along Amazon rivers. We were fortunate enough to have amazing guides with us through the whole trip so we spotted so many awesome animals and plants that we would have never seen on our own. Just in the first 2.5-hour period in the Amazon we had seen sloths, snakes, many birds, and trees galore. Our hotel didn’t have electricity so everything was lit by candlelight. As well as this it was all built around boardwalks because during the rainy season there would be about a foot and a half of water below the structures. It was a pretty and perfect amazon hotel.

The first day we got up had a fantastic very un-Ecuadorian breakfast and headed out for a jungle walk. Our guide clearly had grown up in the jungle and knew all the ins and outs of the trees and plants that were surrounding us. We ate a leaf of which the extract is used to make aspirin, tasted very sweet “tree milk”, and smoked a branch that is, according to our guide, “jungle cigarettes”. We also learned tons about while some trees grow the way they do and what plats have symbiotic relationships. It was so fascinating. My kid-of-two-biologists in me was really excited and I soaked up in the information. We also had the chance to swing on branches like Tarzan; I was the only girl in our group who was able to do it, thanks to the small remains of my skier arms. After wadding through a swamp to get back to our canoe we headed back for lunch. That afternoon after the typical Latin American “siesta” we headed out to go piranha fishing. They handed us sticks with some string and a hook on the bottom along with a bag of freshly chopped red meat. We spend the better part of two hours sitting there temping the piranhas with our meat and they out-smarted and ate the meat with out getting caught. But by the end of the afternoon we had caught about 5 piranhas. I caught the biggest one of all that was close to a foot long! It had very large teeth and I was told it could eat off my finger if it got to close. Needless to say I kept it at arms length. Then we headed out for a sunset swim in the near by lagoon.  We even got to spot pink dolphins and crocodiles on the way home. It was a wonderful day.

The next day we headed out with a boxed lunch to the nearby indigenous community. We ate some traditional food, and got to visit the shaman. It was cool to see a little bit of what they lived like, but it felt so fake and touristy that it wasn’t my favorite part. The tribe had a pet monkey that liked to play, or in my case try to mate, with the tourists. It was very soft and funny until it started to bite my nose. That was not so much fun, but the other AFSers thought it was just the funniest.  The two-hour canoe ride there and back was amazing as always. That night we did a night walk with candles and flashlights, we got to see a ton of huge spiders and some other super cool night critters. It was a little spooky but also like living the dream, I a mean come on, a night walk in the amazon, too cool!

The next day we headed back to the bus with one last amazing 2.5-hour canoe ride through the jungle.

It was an amazing trip is so many aspects; I got to spend with some amazing AFSers, see awesome animals, eat good not Ecuadorian food, and have a bit of a vacation. We headed back to Quito and then headed out on a short mountain excursion, but I will save that for another blog. Sorry that this was a bit more of a summer of a trip and less thoughtful than normal….. more soon. Love you all.

Livin’ life on the loose.  

Island In the Sun

On and on and in the sun

We’ll be playing and having fun

And it makes it feel so find I can’t control my brain

Life is flying by like I never knew possible. I woke up this morning to realize that today was the 1^st of May, marking my last full month I get to spend in this wonderful country. I have been thinking a lot over the past week or so about how fast everything is going. This dream that has been over two years in the making, from the first conversations bridged with the parentals to stepping out of their hugs and nervously going through airport security to where I am sitting now singing along in my head to my sisters Spanish pop songs and waiting to eat the comfort food of rice and meat. When did the change happen? When did I gain confidence? When did I learn how to speak Spanish? When did I stop caring that I am a tall white giant giraffe here? When did I make my self a life in another country? It didn’t happen all at once and I know there were tears and hard times along the way, but they seem to fad and give way to the wonderful smells, colors, conversations, words, weeks, months, sights, voices, and friends that have and are shaping my Ecuadorian year. Today I realize how much I have changed, how much life is going to be different after this year. This will not just be a year in my life, it will be a marker, similar (I imagine) to the markers of getting married, having kids, going to college, and getting through that mid-life crises that everyone fears. It will and has changed me. What will I be when I get home? Who will my friends be? Where will life take me? I am scared. Excited. Sad. Elated. And every other emotion that one person can hold. All I can say is that the adventure of life is carrying me down its twisting river and I am just trying to hold on while enjoying the view.

With that part done I will do some catching up on what I have been doing lately.

I have been back from the Galapagos for about a week and it was amazing! A trip to never forget.

The first day we got up very early and headed out from Quito (where we had been staying) and headed to the airport. The experience at the airport with all the AFSers was sort of strange because we all felt that it was a semi-practice run for going home and it was strangely emotional. But mostly we were just super pumped to go to the Galapagos. We then took about a two and a half hour trip out to the islands, they are quite a bit farther out then most people think, sort of like Hawaii from the US. When we got there we were immediately hit but the need to get into warm weather clothes as we were dying of heat. The view was amazing and I knew this was going to be a wonderful trip. Then we were shuttled to a boat to take us to the island that we were going to be staying at for the next bunch of days. I along with some other wonderful AFSers (Carlotta and Alicia, love you girls) got the ride up in the top level of the boat with our driver. It was wonderful and I managed to wrap a towel across my sholders the not get to sunburned. I felt like I had just arrived to paradise.  We got there a little bit before the other boat of AFSers so we had time to head to the hotel throw on our swimsuits and go swimming. What we didn’t know though was that we would be swimming with sea lions. They would pop up right next to you and next to you and play around you. It was so cool. After lots of traveling and a long day we headed to bed and got ready for a crazy day two.

The next day was even better then the first. We got up early and started on what was going to be the perfect trip for the inner nerd in me. We walked around the crater of a large active volacano. For me the high light was when it started raining and all the rain was steaming off the craters rocking covering because it was so hot. It was then that you could really appreciate how you were really walking around a volcano. We hiked though mud (fun) and lots of lava rocks. It was impressive and wonderful to see what our earth can do to form the land around it. A hike I will not soon forget. That afternoon we headed out to go snorkeling and had an amazing time floating in the sun and enjoying the crazy warm ocean. The day was amazing even if the volcano provided me with more than a little bit of sunburn, it’s not the first time and not the last. But for the record, I did put on sunscreen, but I am pretty sure that when the Ecuadorian sun and Ellie’s pasty white skin fight I will always loose.

On day three we headed out in a little boat to an island to see more sea lions, seals, penguins (the only ones that life north of the Equator!) and the cool little sea iguanas. It was awesome wandering around and just encountering all this wildlife you are sure you are only ever going to see in zoos in its natural habitat. We were hoping to spot some sharks, but they seemed to evade us. Ohh well can’t have it all. We were all quite excited with the wildlife we got to saw. Then we headed out for a second snorkel trip that was quite like the first, but I enjoyed immensely. I split away from the group a little bit with Alica and we had a good time just exploring the wonderful world under the sea. So much to see and just floating their enjoying life was a great experience of what a lucky duck I am. That afternoon we headed out to the Giant Turtle Center and learned a lot about the process of bringing the almost extinct species of turtles back to life on the islands. They are not only trying to regrow the population but also trying to eradicate the exotic species that have made them extinct like wild dogs, rats, and goats. Quite the endeavor if you ask me, I don’t have a clue how you go about erecting a whole population of rats from an island, but they have done it. Props to them. We also saw a wall build by prisoners who used to live on the island, a lava tunnel, and the “playa de amor” (beach of love). It was a wonderful and activity filled afternoon.

With the end of our stay approaching and day for on us we took a boat back to the island Puerto Ayora where we did some very typical touristy things. We saw Darwin Research Station with some very cool turtles and iguanas. A high light was Lonesome George a poor male turtle who is the last in his species and when he dies there are none left. It was sad and cool be able to see this first hand and also a must see when in the Galapagos. My favorite part about George is there are restaurants and hotels named after him and when he dies what are they going to do?!?! We also saw a facility that mimics natural conditions but is fenced of and controlled to introduce turtles back in to the wild conditions. We wandered around and bought some souvenirs as well as it was the largest city in the islands. The next morning was hopping a plan back to Quito and finishing our wonderful Galapagos dream.

Livin’ life on the loose.