Kerri

After one last day in Quito spent doing laundry and frantically trying to buy airline tickets for our flights within Peru, we were ready to head south to spend some quality time in the quaint town of Bathrooms. I believe the town was actually named for its thermal baths, but I find Bathrooms a funnier translation. Baños is in the central sierra, but it is a good 1000 meters lower than other sierra towns so there´s pretty nice, warm weather here. The town sits at the base of the active Volcano Tungurahua (aka The Black Giant), which is a beautiful cone shaped volcano covered in snow. It has been erupting a bit in the past few years, but at the moment its nothing to be worried about.

To get to Baños, we took a 3.5 hour bus ride south from Quito in the afternoon through the Avenue of the Volcanoes (I think there are 7 or 8 of them on either side of the main road). We shared the bus with some crying babies and a dashing young man carrying a tiny white puppy in a plastic sack (to prevent any unwanted accidents, I´m guessing). I took 100 pictures out the window and Rachel tried to sleep. Unfortunately for her, everyone who came on and off the bus bumped into her as they made their way down the aisle and for some reason all of them had mud on them and managed to cover Rachel´s arms in dirt. I ate some peanuts and took more pictures. Then an old woman walking down the aisle paused near Rachel and somehow covered Rachel´s head with her shawl on accident.

We are staying at a pretty cute hotel here called Plantas y Blanco. It literally means Plants and White, such a creative name. The rooms are great, we have free internet (though it´s practically useless for me since the computer here won´t recognize my portable hard drive with all my pictures on it), and a beautiful roof top terrace restaurant with awesome food.

We woke up early today and took the obligatory bike ride along the ¨Ruta de las Cascadas¨, or the route of the waterfalls. We rented some bikes for $5 and took off at about 9am through town. The road we took is on the way to Puyo, in the jungle, so we essentially biked a third of the way to the jungle. We biked a good 20 or so kilometers. For a while we shared the road with trucks and cars, biked through a pitch black tunnel with no lights (I am starting to think the Ecuadorians are a bit crazy), and became covered in sweat. I managed to take some video while I was biking because I couldn´t pass on capturing the beautiful mountain scenery around us. We stopped every so often to look at the waterfalls along the side of the road. Our main destination, however, was Pailon del Diablo, the most famous waterfall on the route. I just Googled it for more information, and you might be excited to know it was featured in the movie Proof of Life with Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe at the end. It is essentially 3 waterfalls in one, but for a long time nobody could figure out where its origin was and only the last part of the waterfall could be seen shooting out of a cliff. It´s gorgeous. We had to hike down the mountain for about 15 minutes to get to the view point. The all uphill climb afterwards wasn´t so nice. Rachel and I were panting and sweating like pigs. But we kept passing old ladies being escorted by their grandsons and giant French women in ballet flats on the trail, and this was a bit baffling to us.

Before el Diablo, we went on a short 50 cent hike to see the two other feeder water falls, San Pedro and San Miguel. (I could have the names wrong.) Our new, super friendly drug addict friend Antonio collected our 50 cent entry fee at the start of the trail (he was giving everyone a discount, so he said). We thought that we´d pay and then be off on our little hike. Not quite. After he discovered we were ¨California angels¨he could not stop talking. He somehow got on the subject of the 3rd and 11th dimensions and paintings that would be hung along the trail that would be like a giant puzzle to the story of the waterfalls and anyone who ¨understood¨would understand the real, deep meaning of it all. He made us promise, as well, if we ever met Robert DeNiro or Quentin Tarantino that we would tell them that he was waiting for them in Baños. We promised.

We took a camioneta back into town rather than biking back again. We tried to get some money out of the bank and the ATM wouldn´t work. Rachel only had $12 at this point and I had none. At this point we thought we would have to survive on $12 for the next few days until we could figure out what to do or how to get our cards to work. Everything turned out to be okay in the end and Rachel´s other card ended up working at another bank, but it all gave us a little scare and reminded us that we can´t be spending too much money anyway. We´ve been splurging at bit and buying $4 meals for dinner. Oh, so expensive! Shame on us. I just have to make sure I have enough money at the end of my trip to cover another 3 months down here in South America.

As we were typing in our blogs just now, some Argentinian and Colombian guys just introduced themselves and asked if we wanted to go to the thermal baths with them. We said we wanted to just stay on the internet and go to bed. They must think Americans are so boring. Perhaps we are. At least tonight.

One more random story before we are off to bed... there was a parade earlier today while we were using the internet cafe. I am not sure of its purpose but I saw a bunch of young boys jumping and twirling around in the street in purple and red shiny pantsuits to the tune of a marching band. I missed video taping it. Later in the afternoon we were walking along the same street and I saw a mass of people coming towards us in the street and heard some music. I took my camera out with lightening speed and yelled out excitedly, ¨I am going to video tape this!!!!¨. Turns out it was a funeral march. And the whole entire town was mourning the loss of this man. Oops.

Cuenca tomorrow... 6 hour bus ride... yay.

As I write this, it´s our last day on the islands. Dinner tonight, sleep, wake up, breakfast, airport. I´m sad to leave because it´s been such a nice contrast to Quito´s cold and rainy weather, and smoggy polluted city. But it will also be nice to not have to cover myself from head to toe in sunscreen every 10 minutes once we´re back on the mainland! The humidity is actually the worst on Santa Cruz, the island we are on now. It´s almost 7pm and I am sweating like a pig! Imagine what it´s like during the day when we are hiking through the cactus and lava covered landscape.

Anyway, back to post-Floreana. After our beach stop, we traveled by boat to Isabela, the largest island. The boat trip was really crazy because the wind was exceptionally strong that day. I will spare you all the details, but to give you an idea of how rocky it was, there was an Israeli guy who I thought was just looking at the nice view of Tortuga Island as we passed by, but then when I took a closer look I realized he wasn´t gazing at the scenery... he was throwing up overboard. Oops. I, on the other hand, somehow managed to read a book during it all. It calmed me down a bit and I didn´t pay so much attention to the rocking of the boat. Or the fact that we were in deep, deep water!

The next day on Isabela, we piled into a van and drove up to the highlands. For some reason our driver turned the A/C on for the first 10 minutes, which was wonderful, but then he mysteriously turned it off for the rest of our 40 minute drive and we all sat in the uncomfortable heat as we bounced up the dirt road toward Volcan Sierra Negra. Once we got to the horse ranch, we were all given a small horse that would be ours for the day. I never caught the name of mine, but all I can tell you is that he liked to bite other horses, he refused to run except when all the other horses around him started to gallop, and he didn´t like it when other horses overtook him. He also made my butt hurt, well, the saddle did... after about 4 hours of riding on his back! Our horses took us to the rim of the Sierra Negra crater, which is the second largest volcano crater in the world after one in Africa. It´s about 10 km in diameter and you can still see some steam coming up from the flat expanse of lava if you look closely. We road along the rim and then stopped for a hike to the nearby Volcan Chico, which last erupted in the 1970s. We walked across the lava flow, which looked like the moon. We had a picnic lunch under the shade of a tree (yay, shade! It´s rare here) and then hopped back on our trusty horses to go back. My horse started off in front along with the two Norweigan girls and two Danish guys, and we were galloping along and my lunch was bouncing around inside my stomach and it was a bit uncomfortable... Rachel´s and the rest of the group´s horses started off after us at a slower pace and soon we couldn´t see them anymore. But then out of the blue, my horse decided he didn´t want to run anymore! I was left in the middle of the two groups as the others quickly ran off in front of me and left me and my nameless horse in the dust. Well, in the mud, actually. My horse slowed down, nibbled some grass here and there, and soon it was just me, the mud, the volcano, and my horse. It was kind of nice to be alone for a while, but then I started to wonder what would happen if my horse decided to take off and race down into the crater. So I started hoping that the other group would catch up to me, and soon they did.

Later that afternoon, our butts were hurting like crazy, my knees felt like someone had hit them with a hammer, and it was hot. Rachel wasn´t feeling too great overall, so she stayed in the hotel and took a nap for the rest of the afternoon. I decided I wanted to see some more of what Isabela had to offer because we´d be leaving the next day, so I walked to the beach with Flavia (my German friend) and Phillip (the funny 6.5 foot tall Swedish guy). I forgot to mention earlier that when we met Phillip, his lips were gigantic. He made a point to tell us that he´d been stung on the lips a few weeks earlier by a mystery bug while in Banos and so his lips were normally not so huge. Sadly, his lips never made it down to their original size and he is still having to cover them with lip gloss and bright white sunscreen. He also got the most sunburnt out of all of us... his poor back was lobster red, and his feet were so burnt that they swelled up, too, and he couldn´t even put his flippers on to go snorkeling. Then his lips started to hurt from the salt water and snorkeling mask, so he had to sit out on one of our best snorkeling trips with the sea lions. He is really funny and good humored, though, and even though he´s clearly suffering I don´t think I ever heard him complain except when we forced him to complain because he deserved to! And when you see him with his glasses and giant lips with pink berry lip gloss smeared all over them, you just can´t help but smile a bit.

Anyway, back to the beach... it was really beautiful and relaxing. I took some more pictures of a bunch of marine iguanas lounging around on some rocks in a pile of about 100. There were also some bright red crabs but they were a bit too shy and I could never get close enough to get a good picture. We swam a bit, watched the beginning of the sunset, and enjoyed our time to finally relax a bit

That night we went to a really neat bar on the beach with our entire group. It was the first time we all hung out together at night (the other nights just a few of us would go out to different places), so it was nice to have everyone together. We got the chance to get to know each other a bit better and the Israelis became a bit less shy and then we ended up dancing with our boat captains until 1;30am. They appeared out of nowhere and it was really hilarious to see them try to dance. Flavia, the Norweigan girls, and Mathis (Danish guy) all ended up dancing a bit of salsa for a bit. If only I were good enough, too. At the end of the night it was just Flavia, me, Matan, Oskar, and Sofia (our silly travel agent... why is it that Rachel and I always end up going on our tours with the agents who sold us the tours? Haha). As we walked home, we looked up and realized we had never seen so many stars before. It was beautiful.

The next day we had the chance to snorkel with penguins! The penguins in the Galapagos are the only tropical penguins in the world. They are too cute. And very speedy! We spent a while in the water trying to chase them down so we could actually see them up close. They just flew through the water with the greatest of ease, I cannot figure out how they managed to move so quickly. We also saw an octopus and blue footed boobies.

After our swim with the penguins we went to Tiburon Islet and hiked around a bit. It is a small little island that we easily walked the length of in a half hour or so, formed completely of black lava. We saw those crazy red crabs again, more iguanas lounging around on rocks and spitting salt water out of their noses at us, and some really cute sea lions that were total hams for all of us photographers. There was a mother and baby who flung themselves out onto the rocks in front of us and just started striking a bunch of poses. They are so playful and fun... can we have one for a pet Mom and Dad?

In the afternoon we sailed (okay, I mean we flew across the ocean at lightening speed) to Santa Cruz, the last island stop on our tour. We stayed in Puerto Ayora, the main town in the Galapagos with about 12,000 inhabitants. We were there for 3 nights. We ended up changing around the next day of our tour because nobody seemed to like the idea of waking up at 4am to take a 45 minute bus ride to the north of the island and then take a 3 hour boat ride to Bartolome Island (it is the island that is always in the typical Galapagos Island pictures.... very beautiful, apparently full of penguins, but we already had the great luck of swimming with some on Isabela). Instead, we bused to the north of the island and then went to North Seymour Island instead, a short boat ride away (on a much calmer, slower boat this time with plenty of room to lounge around on). This island is very small, but it is a great place to see the magnificant frigatbird. At the time we went, there were also a ton of baby frigatebirds and they were really cute. They also let you get so close to them! I took a picture sitting right next to a baby frigatebird, who kind of just stared at me a bit and wiggled its throat in a weird way (perhaps it was hungry?). The male frigatebird has a large red balloon like pouch on its throat and it puffs it up to attract females. It's pretty funny looking, but the bright red color is definitely very striking agains the dark black color of the rest of its body. The males and females take turns sitting on their eggs, and while we were there we mainly saw the males in the nests.

We then snorkeled a bit more, though this time we didn't see many interesting things except a bunch of different types of fish. I believe we were supposed to see some sharks but either way it felt amazing to jump into the water since it was so hot and humid outside during our hike! I lost my snorkel, though, unfortunately and had to buy a new one later.

On our last full day, we drove up into the highlands again our bus dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. Turns out we were going to see some lava tubes on someone´s private property. There is a ranch on the property and the owner´s cows started mysteriously disappearing one day. When he went to investigate, that´s when he discovered the gigantic lava tubes... the cows had been falling through the ground into the lava tubes the whole time! Oops. Lava tubes are formed when the lava flowing down the volcano cools faster on the outside than in the inside. We walked through one of them and it was enormous! In some parts the ceiling was at least over 100 feet tall, and in another part we had to shimmy on the ground and get a bit muddy. After the lava tubes, we went to see... you guessed it... MORE turtles. (One of the guys on our trip wrote ¨no more turtles!¨as a complaint on his review sheet at the end of the tour.) We went to the Charles Darwin Center, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the islands and their flora and fauna. It´s run entirely on donations, mainly from tourists. Around the center are some tortoises, iguanas, and other endemic species to the islands... and good old Lonesome George is one of them. In Spanish, he´s called ¨Solitario Jorge¨... heehee. So amusing. We just saw his butt, unfortunately. He didn´t feel like turning around to greet us. He lives with two females from neighboring islands, because they are the closest match to his species, but he doesn´t want anything to do with them. Sadly, there aren´t any more females of his own species left, so he is essentially the end of the line.

We went out every night on the islands to local bars, and well... of course we had to go out on our last night, too! Right? We all went to a nearby bar to have a drink and talk one last time. The bartender made Rachel and I margaritas that tasted like salt and ice. They sure don´t know how to do Mexican ANYTHING here in Ecuador! Regard everything ¨mexican¨with suspicion here, take my word for it. We ended up meeting these South African boys that we had danced salsa and merengue with the night before and talked to them a bit again. Unfortunately, they weren´t quite bright in the head, but the guy I danced with somehow turned me into a professional dancer and was flipping me and twirling me all over the place. When we chatted with them again, we discovered that they didn´t believe in evolution.... hm, maybe their visit to the Galapagos might change their mind? They are sailing across the ocean on a private yacht, from Panama to Galapagos to French Polynesia. I think they´re insane. Nice, but insane.

We went to go dancing next and turned the club into a foreigners only party. They were playing salsa at first, but I was sneaky and requested some electronica and dance music without the Ecuadorians knowing... soon the floor cleared and it was just Philip, Rachel and I shaking our booties on the giant dance floor. It´s okay, though, because I am pretty sure that we looked great. Or perhaps we didn´t, because soon the salsa music started playing again and everyone crowded the floor. We didn´t have our great South African sailor dance partners again, though, so instead we all sat and watched an Ecuadorian couple dance the salsa and it was quite mesmerizing. They were our age, but they looked like they´d been dancing together since they were 2 years old. All of us sat there with our jaws open, looking like complete idiots. They were really fun to watch. If only I could dance like that. Someday. Must take more lessons.

The next morning, on our last day, we stopped off to view Los Gemeles, aka The Twins. I believe they were the largest (now collapsed) lava tubes to be found in the Galapagos. They are enormous, at least a few football fields wide and just as deep. Afterwards, we continued on north to Baltra island to the airport... where we waited for a lovely 2 hours to board our flight. You have to get there early so that they won´t give your seats away to someone else. It was hot, humid, and they only had A/C and fans in the employee rooms. How nice. We browsed some stalls with overpriced trinkets, gazed longingly at the computers with overpriced internet, and I drank a nice cold coke. Finally we boarded at 1245 and we were off. We didn´t get home until around 6pm, even though our travel time was only 3 hours total.

I was a bit sad when everyone was saying goodbye at the airport. I really liked getting to know Flavia (from Germany), Matan (Israel), Philip (Sweden), and the Danish guys and Norwegian girls. I made extremely vague plans to visit all of the Europeans this fall when I go to Germany... it would be nice to visit Scandinavia for the first time and have some local friends to show me around Matan, however, is actually following a similar route to ours and will be in Peru later on... so perhaps we will meet up with him again.

Anyway, the Galapagos trip was amazing overall and I really enjoyed everything (minus the humidity, which I wasn´t expecting... okay, or the crazy speed boat rides and the choppy waters). I was surprised by how green some of the islands were... I was expecting the islands to be mainly lava and cacti from the bits I´d heard about the iGalapagos before we arrived, but in some areas of the islands I really felt like I was in a cloud forest. Everything was beautiful in its own way, from the cloud forest areas to the lava moonscape near Volcan Chico to the deserty areas to the beaches. The animals were so fearless, especially the baby frigatebirds (well, perhaps this is becuase they couldn´t exactly fly or run away from us yet!) and the sea lions. My favorite part of the entire trip was definitely having the chance to swim with the sea lions. I wonder what they thought we were with our funny looking googles and snorkels? I can´t wait to get my underwater camera pictures developed... I took a whole roll of just the sea lions as they dive bombed our faces and swam in circles around us underwater.

Sad to be back on the mainland now that we´ve left the Galapagos Islands behind, but also excited for the rest of our trip south... we´re in Baños (teehee... bathrooms) now as I write this, and its gorgeous...

Wow, I´m in the Galapagos Islands! Crazy! Thank you thank you thank you Mutti und Pappi fuer dieses wunderbare Geschenk

It´s our 6th day here and we´ll be flying back to Quito on Wednesday after lunch. I´m not ready to go yet. Although the sun is ridiculously hot since we´re at the equator and we´re running around in our bikinis every day and snorkeling, so it´s a bit uncomfortable, especially with our small sunburns we got the other day. But other than that, it´s been an awesome trip so far.

We arrived last Wednesday after a pretty smooth 3 hour flight from Quito. We spent our first couple of days on San Cristobal Island, which if I remember correctly is the oldest island of them all. It´s fairly large, but the main town itself is pretty sleepy, cute, and extremely safe. And yay, no pollution like in Quito! We first went to the information center and learned a bit about the islands and conservation efforts. Then we went on a little hike behind the center to a beautiful viewpoint and then after we were good and sweaty we hiked down to a small bay where we could jump in the water for a bit. There was a male bull sea lion in one of the coves, however, so I didn´t want to stay in the water too long in case he got angry with us. We then spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening hanging out at a nearby beach and relaxing before dinner.

On Thursday we drove up to the highlands and passed through four different areas of vegetation. The people on the islands grow coffee and other crops. We ended up in the pampas area, which is normally a bit cooler and often misty. We went to the breeding center for San Cristobal´s tortoises and got to see a ton of little babies. There are only 12 species of giant tortoises left in the world, and most of them are native to the Galapagos Islands. However, their populations were reduced almost to extinction by sailors who brought them on their ships for meat as well as by many introduced species on the islands that either eat their eggs, eat or destroy the vegetation they feed on, or harm them in some other way. The breeding center raises baby tortoises in cages until they are 5 years old (and at this point, they are hardly bigger than your hand), after which they can let them go into the wild because their shells have hardened enough to protect them from predators like goats, cows, rats, etc. It takes them a good 150 years to become full grown. We got to see some large tortoises at feeding time and they also put on an impromptou mating show for us! They are so enormous, wrinkly, slow, dinosaur-like, and awkward looking. But I love them.

We got to snorkel again later at Los Lobos island and Leon Dormido, both small nearby islands. The first stop involved... get this... snorkeling with sea lions!!!! It was incredible. I was afraid at first because they are so playful and curious and they dart towards your face underwater and then swim away in another direction at the last second. But my god, they are just so cute. Then above water, they are just like dogs, barking and curling up in little balls to sleep, or staring at your with their wide brown eyes. It was so much fun to be able to be so close to them in their natural environment. Our second stop involved snorkeling that was a bit more advanced because it was in very deep water and there were about 100 sharks below us. I believe they were harmless reef sharks of some type, but our guide Jorge assured us that there is such an abundance of food in the Galapagos that they wouldn´t be interested in dining on us anyway I wasn´t quite sure what was going to be beneath me when I first jumped into the water, but as soon as I looked down and saw the sharks, I screamed and made a beeline towards my German friend Flavia... because if I was to be devoured by 100 sharks, I didn´t want to be devoured alone!

On Friday we woke up early and took the Costa boat (our speedy transport between islands) to our next destination, Floreana Island. I love the history of Floreana, because it involves a bunch of crazy German colonists interested in creating a utopian society, a husband and wife who removed all their teeth before arriving and then shared a pair of metal dentures, an Austrian woman who came with her 3 lovers and called herself the Empress of Floreana, stories of murder, disappearances, general craziness, and, of course, pirates.

Floreana only has about 80 people living on it. We landed at the sleepy port and took a billion photos of the marine iguanas lounding around on the black lava rocks near the water. They are black and completely blend in with the rocks, so it´s often hard to spot them at first, and are the only species of iguana that live on land and water. They are vegetarians, feeding on just the algae in the water, and have developed a neat adaptation to help with all the salt water that they consume... they kind of spit water out of their noses ever so often, and this is their way to rid their bodies of the excess salt. We then did a bit more snorkeling, where I saw a sea turtle briefly as it flew through the water. I was also bitten by thousands of tiny, bright blue plankton type things that were floating in the water all around us. Good times.

Anyhoo... time for dinner, but more to come later about the rest of our trip

Kerri

Rachel and I almost died about 10 times this weekend. But no worries, we are okay, I promise

We were looking for a jungle tour very last minute on Thursday... as in the night before we wanted to leave. The jungle tour we wanted to go on turned out to have some problems, so we were left scrambling around La Mariscal trying to find a cool, cheap, last minute tour that had everything we wanted to do. We popped into a random tour agency run by an Australian man who had just started working there that Monday, his tour sounded good even though he didn't know what exactly he was selling since he hadn't yet been there himself, but we bought it anyway! The kicker was the fact that he was going to come on the tour with us and he agreed to be our chauffer to and from the jungle so that we wouldn't have to take another one of those crazy Ecuadorian buses driven by wannabe race car drivers.

The tour turned out to be an awesome adventure. We drove to Tena on Friday night with Julian, our tour agent, who is actually pretty close in age to us (25)... though he's married to an Ecuadorian woman. We were driving on the dirt roads through the Andes mountains and down through the foothills to the jungle at night, and it was a pretty scary journey. Mostly because Julian spent a good deal of time telling us scary stories and we all freaked ourselves out every time we turned a corner and discovered a creepy looking, deserted shack of a house. But the road itself was also a bit dangerous since we were driving in really terrible fog and there were constantly giant tankers and buses zooming past us. The rule of tonnage applies here in Ecuador, I guess, as it did in Vietnam... at one point we came face to face with a giant bus bound for Quito and it kept edging towards us without giving us time to back up and get out of its way! Crazy drivers. We also passed a family of 10 llamas lounging around on the side of the road. We tried to nudge them off the road but they must have had a death wish because they wouldn't move. We finally arrived in Tena at around 11pm, found a hostel, Rachel got scared of a black and red bug in the bathroom, we isolated it, put on our pjs, and crashed for the night.

The next morning we met up with the owner of the Sachapakari Lodge. He bought us some palm tree larvae... which were these giant, fat, white wriggling larval worms... and we got the chance to eat them. I was a bit disturbed by tehir heads because they had tiny prickly things on them, but after a minute of trying to actually put the thing in my mouth, I sucked it up and chomped off a big, delicious bite. The thing was actually really good! Rachel then tried to take a bite, and actually succeeded at biting the thing in half before she suddenly had a delayed reaction of disgust, flung one piece to the ground, spit the other one out, and ran away screaming. All of this is caught on video

After our larva feast, our guide took us to the Jumandy Caverns a bit outside of Tena. Jumandy was an indigenous leader in the 1500s who fought for his people against the Spanish conquistadors. He is a legend in the town of Achidona and there are statues, large naked paintings of him (?), and other references to him all over the town. He hid from the Spanish in the caverns and they were never able to find him in there because the cave system goes on for so long and is pitch black inside. We met up with two Ecuadorians from Santo Domingo who were joining our tour, Diego and Diana (who supposedly were not dating but it sure seemed like that was a lie!) and all went on a really exciting tour of the caverns. We went in barefoot, but it was actually a lot easier to grip the slippery wet, muddy rocks with our feet than with shoes on. We jumped around rocks, swam across giant, bottomless pools of dark water, found some stalagmites and stalagtites, as well as the giant 10 foot tall penis of Jumandy (a stalagmite formation). Deeper in the caves, there were some waterfalls and a 15 foot deep hole filled with water (similar to a small well). Julian was the only one who was able to touch the bottom! (I was too nervous to try swimming down there.) We hiked up and up some muddy rocks to get out of the cave, trampled across some muddy fields, and finally made it back to the start covered in mud and completely soaking wet. It was really fun

We then met up with some other people from the lodge who were already in the middle of their tour. We hiked to a lagoon on the other side of the Rio Napo where we went bird watching for a prehistoric-type bird. It has a really weird croaking type of call and looks kind of like a giant turkey... at least that's all I could tell as I tried my hardest to see it among the trees. Later we went to a family's house where we learned how to make chicha, a fermented drink that is made from the yucca plant. Traditionally it is made with human spit, but it wasn't this time. Women always are the ones to pound the yucca and prepare the drink. The indigenous people often drink chicha morning noon and night, sometimes even substituting it for a meal. The drink had a pretty bitter taste... didn't really like it much. On our hike back to the boat, I discovered that two of the girls in our group were from Germany so I tried to practice my German on them after not speaking it in a year and discovered that yes, I still can hold a conversation. Amazing. Though I found myself responding with ''Si, si!'' every time I wanted to say yes instead of ''ja''.

We then took a 40 minute drive through the jungle on a new road to get to our lodge in Misahuilli. Previously, Misahuilli had been THE cool jumping off point for jungle tours, but then Tena became a more popular place for tours to base themselves out of. However, Misahuilli still has some of the best jungle in the area so it was great that our lodge was in that area. We were really far our there... on our 40 minute drive on the rocky road all we passed were some random houses here and there, we forded a few rivers, and then had to hike another 10 minutes through the jungle to get to our lodge. It was really a beautiful place and I would definitely recommend the lodge and their tours to anyone! Everything was clean, beautiful, the food was amazing and they made sure to stuff us full for all our adventures. The guides were hilarious and really friendly.

That first night at the lodge was definitely very interesting. A shaman visited and demonstrated the soul cleansing techniques he often uses on family members and friends in the neighboring villages. He had been a shaman for 53 years (he started to learn from older shamans when he was 20), and he had a few sons, one of which was studying to become a shaman as well. Shamanism runs in families, apparently. He drank a cup of ayhuasca, a hallucinogenic plant that shamans use to alter their state of being and help them with their rituals. He passed around a cup with a few drops in it and we all got to try a teeny tiny sip. We all sat around the fire and listened to him as he chanted for a good 3 or 4 minutes, took a few drags on a cigarette, and then started hitting one of our fellow travellers on the head with a bunch of dried leaves about 100 times, all the while continuing his chanting. His assistant then lit another cigarette for him, he inhaled, then proceeded to blow the smoke onto the top of the man's hair. He then sucked a bunch of spit into his mouth, took another drag on the cigarette, and I could have sworn he spit on the poor man's head. Well, I soon found out for myself that the shaman did NOT spit on the guy's head.... for a minute later, Hugo pointed to me and said ''Come''. I was kind of confused, but went and sat in front of the shaman. I got the whole shebang! I was beaten on the head with leaves, had cigarette smoke blown into my hair as the shaman kissed my head, and... he didn't actually spit on me! Yes! But now I smelled like smoke. The entire time he was beating me on the head chanting, I had to try really hard not to imagine what Rachel was thinking as she watched me. I knew if my thoughts wandered to her... I would burst out laughing and offend the shaman. Didn't want to do that. I can't say he actually cleansed my soul, but I can say that I had an absolutely wonderful time during the next two days of the tour, so maybe I have him to thank for that?

After our shaman experience, we all drank some ayusca tea with rum (not the same as ayuhasca... this tea is just a normal tea) and we all sat in a circle around the fire and played some really silly group games for the next hour or two. Some of the games were so funny I started crying I was laughing so hard. And they were all great for practicing our Spanish! One of the games involved everyone counting off and taking on the name of ''1 limon 1'', ''2 limon'' and so on up until 11. The first person to start had to say their name first, then ''Medio limon'' and then call out the name of another person. It went really quickly and the point of the game was to not accidentally say ''melon'' as you fired out the phrase ''10 limon, medio limon, 2 limon!''. Later we played the game where someone says a word, and then each person afterwards has to repeat the word then add on another and gradually a really ridiculous sentence forms. Our best sentence ended up being: ''You and I are going to my house to fuck a rat, but nothing more, and if you would like a reference, ask my penis''.... aka ''Yo y tu iramos a mi casa chagar un rato, pero nada mas, y si tu quieres una referencia, preguntale a mi pene''. We played a few more games along those lines, and then went to bed to prepare for our crazy 5 hour hike the next morning.

So our hike. It was crazy, it was fast, it was really steep and involved a ton of rocks, boulders, puddles of mud up to our knees, slippery moss, fording across rivers in our boots and getting soaked up to our waists, crossing ravines one at a time across precarious bamboo bridges, swinging on jungle vines like Tarzan, swimming in the river, jumping off 30 foot cliffs into the water, and generally having a really fun jungle adventure Our guide, Hugo, literally ran through the jungle and up and down all the steep and muddy rocky trails... and somehow I was able to keep up with him. He told me I was a very good, strong hiker and wondered where I had learned to hike so well. Maybe I belong in the jungle and should start to work as a tour guide myself. Meanwhile, Rachel and Diana were hiking a bit slower and at one point we realized they were a good 10 minutes behind us all. Along the way, Hugo pointed out the medicinal uses of many jungle plants and trees and then we finally reached our destination... the waterfall. We swam around for a bit and I had some fun scaring the living daylights out of myself by jumping off some cliffs into the river below with our guide, Diego, and Julian. Then we started on our hike back, thankfully a bit shorter this time. Once we got back, Hugo joked that we were going to do the hike again later that night. I definitely don't think Rachel wanted to, and I just wanted to take a shower and get all the mud and sweat off of my body. It was a hard hike, but it is one I will remember for a long while.

Later that night, Diana and Diego left to go back to Quito since they had school the next day. Everyone else had left too, so it was just Rachel, Julian, and I and all three guides. We rested a bit, napped and read in the hammocks, had a delicious traditional fish dinner, and then settled down at the game table for a few hours of some crazy card playing. We played spoons, I taught everyone egyptian ratscrew, and then Julian taught us a really silly but hilarious game where each card represents an action (i.e. 9 means running around your chair and sitting down, 8 means slap the card, 3 means whistle, something else means moo like a cow, and so on) and each time the dealer flips over one of those cards, the last person to do the action loses and has to take the pile of cards that has built up. We were all doubled over laughing because it got to be so ridiculous. A similar card game involved everyone taking on a bad word or an animal sound as their name, and the dealer went around in a circle dealing everyone a card. If you got the same card as another player, you had to be the first to yell out their bad word name or make their animal sound or else you lost. For a while all you heard was moo! ballsack! cockadoodledoooooo! some bad word in Spanish I can't remember! meow!... it was great. Hehe.

As we played by candle light, of course we attracted all the bugs of the jungle to our table. A few of them had death wishes, like the llamas, and flew straight into the flame. Others tanned themselves. Then suddenly, I heard a rustle of leaves behind me. I turned around but couldn't see anything. Hugo noticed me turning around, so he looked as well and shined his light in the direction of the noise. Then he shouted to everyone ''Don't move! It will kill you!'', took his shoe, and stepped on the head of what looked like a giant moth with owl's eyes printed on its wings. We thoguht he was joking about the ''it'll kill you part'', but he had a very serious look on his face and so did all the other guides. Turns out it is the deadly Machacha moth that can kill a person within 2-3 hours if it stings you. It is literally the most hideous looking insect I have ever seen in my life because it has the head of a freaking devil serpant. A picture of one can be seen here... http://www.miputumayo.com/secciones/variedades/sabiausted/1127/machaca.jpg . Don't say I didn't warn you. I had nightmares about that thing! According to our guides, the only way to save yourself is to have sex continuously for 12 hours straight. We didn't know whether to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, or to scream and run for our lives. Except more of these devil moths could have been anywhere, and we didn't really want to die, so we settled on just screaming and jumping around like little girls. The guides all laughed at us, but kept to their story of it's deadliness. We decided game night was over at that point. Meanwhile, Julian was scared out of his mind as well, and happened to discover a giant spider the size of a dinner plate running along the ground. He screamed, we screamed, and then he flung it at us with his shoe. We screamed some more, hopped around, yelled about how we wanted to leave the jungle because we didn't want to die from the sting of a serpant moth, and generally acted like idiots. The guides were really excited, however, because apparently the moth is extremely rare. They had only seen about 2 or 3 of them in their lifetimes. According to them, the last time they had seen one, they were eating dinner at the lodge and one of the moths dive bombed their table and everyone was so scared that they all ducked and plopped their faces into their soup.

The next morning, we woke up somewhat refreshed, a little less scared of the Machaca moth (since it only comes out at night), but we were super paranoid about the bot fly that we had seen flying around on our previous hikes. This fly is also really scary... it targets your ears and shoulders, lays eggs, and then a giant, hairy larval worm grows in your skin and its incredibly painful not to mention DISTURBING. Oh, isn't the jungle wonderful? Well, minus the insects, I say yes. We went on a morning hike to ''The Lookout'' and literally ran through the jungle again. All the while, Hugo kept stopping every so often and smacking Julian on the head because he spotted a bot fly on his ear. Rachel and I then doused our heads with bug spray. As we were climing up a hill, suddenly Julian screamed and almost jumped backwards onto me. He had seen a snake. Hugo laughed hysterically. He must think we are all so silly, screaming at every bug or animal that comes our way. I'm sure he'll remember us fondly. Again, along the hike he explained some really neat medicinal uses of different plants... one of them you can use to make a poison to kill monkeys with, another you can use as a numbing agent if you are bitten by a scorpion, and so on. We also got to eat some ants that taste like lemon, which live in the base of certain leaves. On the way back we got to swing from some jungle vines like Tarzan again All in all, pretty neat but quick hike. Later we went tubing on the Napo River, came back for lunch, showered, and then we said goodbye to the lodge as we headed off for home.

Before we started our long drive home, however, we stopped off in Archidona to see some monkeys! My main goal for the trip! Hugo brought some red onions that apparently the monkeys love to rub on themselves as perfume. They all pounced on us out of the trees and were delighted that we brought them such wonderful presents. Two of them stole Rachel's AND Hugo's ice cream cones and then proceeded to enjoy them in the trees high above. One moneky jumped on Julian's shoulder and wouldn't get off. They were all just SO cute! They looked like creepy little humans, but still... they were cute. We heard some horror stories about how with other tourists, they would grab their cameras and smash them up in the trees into little pieces, or snatch their jewelry off their bodies. But I think they were content with our onions.

The ride back home was gorgeous during the last hours of daylight. The jungle and cloud forest area is one of my favorite parts of Ecuador so far. We had a few territorial dogs actually run AT our car as we were driving a good 50mph as if they actually thought they could scare the car away. We decided that the dogs really just had death wishes, like everything else on our trip did. I can't believe the dogs here. Words of wisdom to any future travelers to Ecuador... stay away from the dogs guarding cows and houses! Around Papallacta area, or halfway through the drive, it got REALLY foggy again to the point where we couldn't even see the road. The stupid thing about the country and jungle roads here is that they don't have reflective lines or anything, so you can't tell if you are on the right side of the road, or even if you are ON the road. It's terrible and incredibly dangerous. But we made it home safely, in part I think to all the Manu Chao we listened to on the way home that kept us all upbeat and alert.

Going back a few days prior to our jungle trip, on our last night at Cecilia's... we went to see an Ecuadorian film titled ''Cuando me toque a mi'' (When it's my turn) at the nearby independent theatre with our housemates. It was a very depressing and weird film with no clear cut ending, but at the same time I really loved it. Plus I was excited that I understood over half of what the characters were saying! Rachel and I are getting really good at understanding Spanish, though our spoken Spanish is still a bit basic since we just only recently learned some new tenses and direct and indirect object words. But even when we were in the jungle we were able to have some basic conversations with Diego, Diana, and our guides. Yay!

Anyhoo, Rachel and I are off to buy a bathing suit for her before we fly to the Galapagos Islands tomorrow morning at 9am sharp. I am so excited for some more sun, snorkeling, and animals.

Besos!
Kerri

So... last weekend Rachel, her friend Juliet, and I took a bus ride to Papallacta to relax a bit in the thermal hot springs. Papallacta is a really tiny town a bit southeast of Quito on the same road we´ll have to take to the jungle. It´s absolutely gorgeous. The bus ride there and back, however, was not so nice. At the bus station before we left, we were asked by a random old man in a business suit on the street corner if we wanted to step on his scale and be weighed. Then we got on the wrong bus and realized just a minute before it left the station that we had to quickly jump off. Our actual bus was then 45 minutes late so we left a bit later than we wanted to. Once on the bus, the driver decided he wanted to drive about 10 mph the entire way to Papallacta, which was great for our safety but he took forever to get us there!

The views on the way to Papallacta were really great, though. I think that area of Ecuador is definitely my favorite so far. It´s almost in the cloud forest, so there are always clouds lying low over the green hills. The town itself is tiny and probably only has a few hundred people. The thermal baths there are supposedly some of the best in Ecuador. Anyway, we got some lunch once we arrived and were served by a completely incompetent waitress. She came to take our order the second we sat down and we said we weren´t ready and asked if she could come back in a minute. But she didn´t come back for 10 minutes even though we stared her down with pleading eyes. Juliet finally went up to her and reminded her we needed to order and she said she´d be right over. She didn´t come. Juliet went up to her again and asked if we could order and the waitress then said, ¨But I already came and asked you if you wanted to order and you said you weren´t ready!¨... as if she had completely forgotten her conversation with Juliet a few minutes earlier. We finally got to order, only to discover that they were out of the tamales I wanted. Juliet and Rachel had ordered trout a few minutes earlier, but I had to re-order and decided on chicken. The trout came right away and I watched as they ate the entire thing. My chicken still hadn´t arrived. I was starving. Rachel and Juliet were done eating. The waitress seemed to have forgotten my meal entirely. Juliet went up to ask her what happened and she made up an excuse that there were 3 chicken orders in front of my order and that´s why it was taking so long. I watched the 3 chicken orders come out to the other tables and the people finished their chicken and I still didn´t get mine! At this point it had been about 30 minutes. Juliet went up to the waitress again and asked if maybe she´d forgotten to put in the order since she didn´t write it down initially. The waitress assured her there was no problem. Finally another waitress came and asked us if we wanted the bill and we pointed out that I still hadn´t actually eaten yet. She gave a little shout in surprise and ran to the kitchen... and came back with my chicken. It had been sitting there the whole time and nobody brought it out to me. I have to say, it was definitely good chicken, but I didn´t want to pay for it... so when a different waitress came to give us our bill I asked her if I could get my chicken for free. She looked at me like I was an idiot, but once we explained what had happened she said she´d go ask. She never returned. We looked around the restaurant and realized that the entire restaurant staff was having a meeting about my chicken and whose fault it was... at that point we realized we´d never get an answer so we just left... and didn´t pay for the chicken.

Other than that, Papallacta was great. We took a hike through the town and the hills with Juliet before she had to bus back to Quito that afternoon. We passed by a soccer field, a giant pipe carrying water up the hills (to Quito area?), a lot of pigs, and a whole lot more stray dogs. And again, there were a lot of people carrying around puppies like dolls. Still don´t get it.

We stayed the night at El Viajero, a small family run hostel on the ¨main¨dirt road through town. You can walk the length of the town in about 10 minutes. Our first view of the hostel included a view of the neighbor TORCHING A PIG WITH A BLOW TORCH... I am not quite sure why he was torching it, perhaps he likes the taste of crunchy, charred pig skin. I took a picture because I couldn´t believe what I was seeing. Later on that day after we came back from our hike, we discovered a pig head hanging from a giant hook on the porch and another pig with, er, half it´s body left, hanging from another hook. A little boy was skipping down the road carrying a bloody pastic bag filled with the pig´s feet. Other than the bloody and charred pig carcasses... the old man and woman running our hostel were so, so cute. They were probably in their 60s and had been running the place for at least 30 years. The woman was about half my size! We were the only guests so we got the chance to talk to them a lot and practice our Spanish. They cooked us some really delicious trout for dinner (trout was a theme dish that weekend) and asked us what type of animals people had in California. I think they thought that we lived in a place similar to their little farm town They had a chicken coop across the street and some cows on the hill that they tended to.

We went to the thermal baths that night and had to take a camioneta (small truck) up the hill to the nice hotel where they were located. He charged us $5 for the mile drive and we thought he was ripping us off since it was supposed tobe $2. We told him to come back to pick us up at 10:15pm but later realized we didn´t want to pay $10 to get to and from the baths so when we went home later we ended up getting a free ride from the hotel workers (¨as long as you say thank you, it is free!¨they said). Three of them piled into the truck with us, bombarding us with questions about ourselves and why we were in Ecuador on the way home. Somehow they misunderstood us or we misunderstood them because suddenly they were yelling out their windows at a bus bound for Quito, thinking that we needed to catch the bus and go home that night. We got home, watched some of the Miss Ecuador pageant (even cheesier than our pagents in the US), and fell asleep to the sound of large trucks, tractors, and buses with bad breaks passing through town all night on their way to the jungle.

We finally got a nice breakfast the next morning that didn´t consist solely of dry bread and jam. Yes! The woman told us that she and her husband had to leave to ¨tend to their cows¨for the morning but that they´d be back by 1pm. Rachel and I decided we´d go on a hike again to explore more of the hills. We started to walk down the main road, only to discover a mean looking bull around one of the bends staring us down. He didn´t seem happy to see us, and we didn´t know if he´d charge us once we got closer, so we changed our hiking route because of the darn cow. We started down the same path we´d taken with Juliet the day before. We suddenly heard some barking and saw a cow pasture in the distance in front of us and realized that the dogs who were guarding the cows had spied us on the trail. The path went right by the pasture, and we weren´t sure if it was a good idea to walk past the dogs... but we hiked on towards them anyway. Bad idea. As soon as we got to their hill, one of the dogs spied us, Rachel screamed, and then 5 large dogs FLEW across the pasture, through the fence, and were suddenly right in front of us, barking like they wanted to kill us. Rachel threw her stick away (that she was going to use to protect us), I yelled ¨NO!¨at the top of my lungs, and the dogs kind of stopped for a second at the sound of my yell. Then they decided they still wanted to eat us and started running towards us again. I screamed at them again, they finally decided I was a big, bad dangerous human not to be messed with, and they trotted back toward their cows. Meanwhile, Rachel and I tried to slowly walk away back up the path we´d come down on, which was a bit hard to do because my legs felt like jelly. So, um, lesson learned... don´t mess with dogs in Ecuador, at least the ones who have cows to guard. They will eat you.

On the way home from Papallacta Rachel and I hailed down a bus in the middle of the road, jumped on, and realized there were no seats available. We had to stand in the ailes for an hour as the bus driver drove like a maniac back to Quito. Just like the bus driver to Otavalo, this guy thought he was driving a race car. We were swerving around corners, I was convinced the bus was going to tip over and we´d all die, we were passing cars going the normal speed, and to us in our magic race car bus it seemed like the cars were driving at a snail´s pace. Rachel and I were bouncing all around the aile of the bus along with another woman who was carrying a newborn baby. I still don´t know why nobody got up for her and offered her their seat. We finally got to sit down after an hour for the rest of the ride back to Quito. Buses here are hit or miss. Too bad we have to take about 20 more bus rides during our trip here.

Ooookay... so back in Quito, we had a ¨ladie´s night¨at our Irish friend´s bar on Monday night... then we spent an hour the next morning trying to find a fax machine for Rachel so she could fax her job contract to her new employer. However, apparently there is only one fax machine in all of Quito. We went into about 20 internet-telephone places that had signs advertising fax machines, only to discover that they actually didn´t have a fax machine or their machine was ¨broken¨. When we finally found one, it cost Rachel $16 to fax her papers! Ridiculous. After she faxed her stuff, we finally had the chance to go up the TeleferiQo on Volcan Pinchincha to get a view of the entire Quito county. The TeleferiQo is a cable car system that takes you up the slopes of Pinchincha to the top. It has a really cheesy themepark at the base called VulQuano Park. Hehehaha. It was a ghost town, but with really terrible rap music filtering through the park. It took about 8 minutes to get to the top, where again it was kind of a ghost town and none of the 10 or so restaurants were open. But the views were amazing! It was really cool to be able to see where we were living in Quito in relation to the rest of the city and all the nearby towns. We could even see Cumbaya, the town in the neighboring valley to Quito. However, we didn´t have much time to spend there since we had to get back to class at 2pm

Last night, Juliet´s African dance instructor invited us to his house because he for some reason wanted to cook dinner for all of us. He is half Benin, half French, and so is fluent in French as well as Spanish. He cooked us a traditional meal from Benin, which was delicious, and then told us that he wanted us to help him become the first singing president of Benin in the 2011 elections. He wanted the help of me and Rachel specifically becuase we majored in political science and he figured we could help him learn political theory. He kissed our hands because he was so excited that we could help. He said in return for our help, he´d cook for us every night. After dinner we watched about 100 music videos from African-French artists, some from Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and Benin. These videos are ones that we probably would have never seen in our lives if he hadn´t shown us! Definitely interesting. But also very confusing since they were all in French... too many languages at once! My brain was hurting. Then Revelejo (that´s really his name) forced me to dance some sort of dance called Zuklove to the music of a Colombian singer and suddenly we were all dancing in his room. I felt very silly because I don´t dance. But it was a fun night overall

Anyway, I doubt anyone has even read this far... this is all for me to remember my trip, too, so I don´t mind if you only skipped down to this last line

Tschuessi!
Kerri