Jungle

Since no one seems to want anything free from me or maybe no reads this anymore I guess it is time for me to babble some more about my trip. At least this way I have it all documented to myself. Although I am going to take Kathy R's advice and I think I am going to make a book with pictures from my trip. I am probably the only one who will ever see it but I a friend of mine made one from his trip to Africa and it was cool so Im gonna do one for Ecuador, may do one for Ben as well and give it to him for his birthday or something like that.

anyway back to the jungle tour

So we went on a four day tour of the jungle. we drove for an hour or so outside of tena, made it to the end of the road and then took a motorized canoe up river and arrived at the jungle lodge where we would be staying. The lodge was pretty cool, way up high above the river. it had some awesome chairs where you could just sit and look out towards the river. It also had a bunch of hammocks that you could just relax in.

Our room at the lodge

The highlights of the tour were just hiking around the jungle, we saw all sorts of different plants, heard tons of birds and some animals, and even got to swing from some vines on the hike and swing from vines I mean totally tarzan style. I tried to get some video but I wasn't sure how to do it with my new camera. We were honestly like 30 feet in the air.

A Walking Tree
(seriously it moves towards sunlight)

Ben swinging from the vines

Me after our guide painted my face with a dragon fruit
Ben couldn't get his face painted because it is only for womenBen and Pato with the handicraft that we made from a palm branch

We also walked around and talked to a couple of families in the jungle, ate some yummy pineapple, got offered Jungle Juice (which is a haluctiongen) and also walked around at night checking out spiders and other inscets.

Random flower I took a photo of

One day we walked about 3 hours from the lodge and arrived at a jungle community. it was very rustic and small. no electricity, no water, not much. We spent the night there and spent sometime with the kids. there weren't many adults around do to a party in a neighboring community (30 min walk away) anyway it was interesting to be in a community like this. The kids learned how to say my name and that is all they would say from then on, until we were playing a soccer game with them and they learned how to say "so close" from Ben (they thought it was his name) Later they learned his name but there favorite thing to say was AmyOne of the waterfalls that we hiked to and swam in


A typical house in this community
one of the nicer ones actually


Our Luxurious sleeping quarters
(we were lucky to stay dry when it was down pouring, yes the roof leaked it was straw)

It was a very different lifestyle than we are used to, I think they see quite a few outsiders so it wasn't that big of a deal that we were there.

Some of the local kids

We also got to see some monkeys, not totally wild like I would have liked. The tour advertised seeing monkeys so I was all excited, turns out they were found on a beach very neat a town, they weren't tame but were very comfortable with people around.

My favorite part of the jungle were the noises at night. There were so many different thing to hear, I couldn't tell what half of it was but it was so cool to hear all the insects, wildlife and rain or whatever else all at once

So how were the bugs you may ask, well the bugs were not all the bad, I expected there to be a ton of mosquitoes but there weren't. The most annoying bugs were these little no-seeunm which you didn't even notice until you realized you were all bit up. and well they didn't go away very fast at all either and the only place the seemed to bite me was around my ankles and up my calves a little ways, so I seemed to walk around for the next week looking like I had chicken pox one my ankles

Oh yeah one other thing about the jungle is that our clothes smelt so badly after being in the jungle, the whole time we were there they never really dried out since it would rain at least once a day, so I tried to wear the same thing the whole time that I was there. I don't think my pants will ever go back to their original color, well it doesn't help that they were already stained red from mine and Laura's adventure to Hawaii last year. but anyway our backpacks stank after the jungle, even though once we were back in town we tried to wash all of our stuff in the shower.