The internet is still kaput at my house, so I ran to school this morning to work on my service learning journal and attend a service learning meeting at 10am. It turns out my meeting is at 10:45, so I have blog-writing time! Hopefully I will have a lot of this sort of time this week since we're just starting a new class this afternoon and we don’t have any midterms for a whole 8 class days!
Last Wednesday 12 out of our group of 15 packed up and headed to Puyo, Ecuador to visit the jungle. We took taxis to the south side of the city, which gets rapidly more sketchy after you pass the panecillo. The air quality also deteriorates significantly, which is saying something because air here is absolutely horrible. Buses spew out clouds of black smoke every time they accelerate, which is frequently, because they stop on the side of the road for anyone who wants to ride, you just have to flag it down like a taxi. Anyway, we managed to pay $8 for a 35 minute taxi-ride (bad traffic, for Quito at least). One guy wanted to charge us $15 for the same ride. We said thanks but no.
The bus station is crazy, it's a really large, nice building, rather like an airport, but there are rows of little booths where you can buy tickets for pretty much any location in Quito. The people working in the booths yell out to you enthusiastically with the list of destinations their bus goes; even though I feel like all travelers probably have a destination in mind already.
We bought our tickets and visited their version of a food court; upstairs, there are lots of little stores which are literally overflowing with all manner of packaged foods and breads, and downstairs, there are several slightly larger booth/restaurants where the salespeople all serve the same thing and all also yell at you to buy their plate of chicken and rice instead of someone else’s.
After a fair amount of confusing as to what time the bus left, where the bus left, who had the bus ticket, and other problems associated with having 12 opinionated people all trying to lead the group, we successfully boarded a bus to Puyo.
Salespeople come on the bus before it leaves and try to sell trinkets or food. One guy made a great choice coming onto our bus and selling cheap little LED key chains because many of us bought one since we didn't have flashlights and we were going to the jungle. Mine broke after two days but I popped it open and fixed the circuit (physics 122, I didn't even need you! ha!) and now it works again :)
After 4.5 hours we got to Puyo and checked in to our hotel, which supposedly had a large snake and a pool, but I was only worried about my bed since we had to be packed and ready to go at 8:30 the next morning. We were actually ready at more like 9, but it all worked out. The Madre Selva tour company picked us up and we went to their nearby headquarters where Austin turned over the second half of our payments ($120 for 3 days and 3 nights, per person) and did not have to sign a single document regarding liability or release.
Then we headed to activity #1, rafting on the Rio Pastaza (Pataza River). Several very entertaining tour guides explained to us what to do in case of piranhas, falling out, capsizing, etc. We all got very attractive helmets and life jackets and embarked. I think it was a class 3 river, so it wasn't as flat as a pool (normally) but there were no waterfalls either. We got soaking wet, but I avoided fall in and getting pushed in. Not everyone was so lucky. I think next time I might choose a slightly more difficult river, but I had lots of fun, and no one was injured or eaten, which is always a plus.
We all loaded the van and headed into town for lunch at a restaurant where they served very yummy food, except for the soup which was normal Ecuadorian soup plus a hunk of monkey (they claimed, but I don't believe them) on a large bone. weird.
We were passed on to another tour guide, Frankie, for our cavern expedition. We drove into the forest and up a mountain for about 40 minutes and got dropped off at this random little concrete structure. It surprised me how much trash and construction materials we saw in the jungle over all the place. We found tons of pop bottles and plastic bags and there were also a lot of dump trucks, back hoes, etc near the river doing some sort of excavation. We weren’t far from Puyo, but the concept of environmental preservation seems pretty limited here.
We followed our tour guide and a trail through the forest, stopping when he told us about certain plants. One tree, for example seemed to bleed when you cut it; they called it “sangre de drago” (dragon's blood), and if you took a small amount of the liquid and rubbed it in your palm, it turned into a lotion which he said was good for our skin and for mosquito bites. We saw a giant worm, literally three feet long, swimming through the puddles in the pathway, but that was about it as far as the animals went. I wasn't surprised though; we were really noisy and not that far into the jungle. The trail quality got progressively worse as we went on (road to gravel path to dirt path to mud) but we had our amazing rubber boots. There was also a tarzan swing (large vine hanging from a tree) which was lots of fun.
The caverns themselves were not particularly enjoyable for me. I've seen caves before that have higher ceilings, fewer spiders and less bat poop, so I didn't stay in very long. I didn't mind, though; I liked the forest a lot. We hiked back and got picked up by another bus which delivered us to our tour guide's house again to pick up our stuff and a new tour guide, Jaime, and then we got on another bus (by bus I mean 12 or 15 seat van) and drove a rather uncomfortable hour to the cabanas (=cabins, I think), our home for the next three days. The road itself didn't quite reach them, so we had to walk about 200 m (lucky for us, we had our $1 flashlights!). I must have explained that 200 m is twice the straight side of a high school track at least 4 times; it's a little strange to be with non-mathematically-inclined people haha.
Living in the cabanas was definitely not like living in a 4 star, or even 2 star hotel, but I really enjoyed it. The living cabins were elevated one story, on stilts, in case the river rose significantly. They had bunk beds, no electricity, mattresses that were definitely less than 2 inches thick, sheets and a blanket, and mosquito nets (the effectiveness of these particular nets is debatable depending on who you talk to in our group; I sustained few bites, but not everyone was so lucky). The net was oddly positioned on my bed: it hung from the center, rather than over on end, so that regardless of the direction I slept, the net wouldn't be suspended over my face; it merely covered it, making breathing somewhat uncomfortable. I used my backpack the second and third nights to prop up the net some.
The cabins had hammocks underneath them. There was also a fire pit with a cabin roof but no walls (and no ventilation) and a kitchen (that had electricity so luckily we could charge our cameras!) with tables under an extended roof. There were also two flush toilets, two cold showers, and one sink. The water disposal from said sink consisted of a 4-foot-long pipe which opened onto the ground behind the sink.. That's it. I assume that the showers had similar plumbing and I hope the toilets had a slightly more sophisticated system but I did not investigate.
We had a late dinner (9:30, probably) and I went to bed.
The next morning we got up pretty early and did more jungle-walking. On our way to the trail head, we wove sweet headbands out of a stem from a plant which perfectly separated into long thin weaveable fibers.
We followed the actual trail for about 5 minutes before fording a small river and turning sharply uphill on a rather less-traveled pathway. Jaime seemed to know what he was doing so we went along with him. After a long long time (1.5 hours, maybe?) we reached a small river where we changed into our swimsuits, but kept our boots on. We walked up the river (up to our thighs) about 30 m, and then we put our stuff on the rocks next to the river. Jaime handed us hunks of light brown, damp, clay and we covered ourselves in it (apparently it is also good for the skin, which I actually believed this time; it felt like a great exfoliant). We then looked considerably more tan, although still like gringos, and swan 15 m around a bend to a really cool little waterfall and pool. There was a vertical log which you could jump off of, and you could sit behind the waterfall. The pictures from this aren't that great, since it was rainy so the flash showed the raindrops and no flash was blurry, but they're decent enough to give you an idea. We played for a long time and then returned to our stuff, reapplied lots of bug spray, and continued on (through similar and then impossible pathways) to a second, much larger, waterfall. I'd had enough swimming so I just climbed on the rocks some and then headed back to the trail head, since we had a nice easy trail to follow again. We lunched at the cabanas and went to see the “mirador” (a viewpoint), which was a few kilometers down the road (we got a ride in the back of a pickup, which seems to be the standard method for transporting people here) and then up a pretty steep staircase.
The view was absolutely incredible. The Rio Pastaza was the central feature, with jungle on either side and mountains in the distance. We enjoyed the hammocks placed as to perfectly take in the view for quite a while. There was also another (much better) Tarzan swing, which went out over a steep drop-off, with the entire view in the background. Jaime was indulgent enough to let us do this again and again, much to our delight. He also showed us a cerbatana (blow gun) that some indigenous people here use for hunting. It's about 3 m long and hunters can shoot darts up to 30 m, I believe, to kill animals such as monkeys (who are not stationary, like our wood monkey target was). Also, when we were in the forest, he showed us the tree that has the bark which can be prepared in a certain way to produce the muscle relaxant that they use for the darts. I enjoyed learning about this because for part of my final exam, I wrote a paper and did a presentation on the Waurani, an indigenous group that uses cerbatanas for hunting.
We eventually stopped alternating between being lazy and being adrenaline junkies and headed to a local indigenous town center, for lack of a better word. There was a bar/artisan store, a soccer field, and swimming pool (large square hole dug in the ground) and pretty much nothing else. There weren't any houses or other businesses, but there were a bunch of people who started playing soccer, so a few of the kids in our group joined in for a while.
Jaime told us that it was a nice 20 minute walk back to the cabanas, and he was right about the nice part, but we learned that his judge of distances and times pretty much need to be doubled, at least. We did eventually make it back to the cabanas though, and the walk was particularly enjoyable because the moon was almost full and incredibly bright (all three nights we were there). At 10 or 11 at night, if there were no clouds, you could literally read by the moonlight.
more to follow!
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