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.