Tarzan and Jungle Girl survived the Oriente!

Photos from the jungle: http://www.flickr.com/gp/9774700@N07/p229Jw

Tarzan and Jungle Girl survived the Oriente! The junge was a blast! Fewer mosquitos than we had anticipated, but we were still happy to bathe in DEET every morning. Things are run a little differently down here. To get to the jungle, we were told to meet at a McDonalds at 8pm. We recognized our classmates by the large backpacks, white skin, and bewildered looks on their faces -- just like us! Finally at 815 or so, as we waited on the corner for what we thought would be our bus, or our teacher, or someone semii-official from the school, a woman came up to us, asking us, in spanish, if we were ready, and if we were all there. Then she hailed two taxis, and motioned for us to get in. We all just shrugged, thought, well, what the hell, and did as we were told. Luckliy we all ended up at the same bus station, and at 9pm boarded a big bus to the Jungle. I´m not sure if we mentioned the driving in our last email or not, but it is WILD here. Nine hours of super narrow (1 1/2 lane) roads, passing on blind corners, and crossing high one lane bridges over deep gorges at night, in heavy fog. Oh yeah, and some brilliant engineer designed the oil pipleline to run right aliong side the road. Safety first! Somehow we managed to make it all in one piece, and with all of our luggage (aside from leaving our Ecuador guide book on the bus---oops!) Once we arrived at our point of entry into the rainforest, we proceeded to wait for another six hours for the last two people who would be joining our group--their 25 minute flight had been delayed. We finally arrived at our fabulous lodge around lunchtime and got settled into our cabins. The food was really good all week, and so were the Spanish lessons, but I think that we both felt like idiots the majority of the time. There were 2 other Spanish students from a different school, Melanie and Colin from England, and two others with our group Eric from Minnesota, and Jayne from Australia. Everyone was a riot. Every day we had excursions into the jungle with our guide Froilan. We saw tons of animals and bugs, and I actually did get to swing from some vines!!! It was great. We´ll write more about our jungle adventures in another entry since my fingers are getting cramped, and we don´t want you to get too bored. We also decided that we will go to the Galapagos after all, since it is about 1/2 price to book it here, and since the water is colder, there will be a lot more wildlife swimming about! You´ll probably get another jungle entry before we head to the coast again (another night bus woo hoo!) tomorrow night for another week of Lessons.

all of the condiments sat on the table, all day, in the heat--including the mayonaise

EXTRA SPECIALA RELEASIA

Notes from the oriente

The Napo is the biggest river in Ecuador, and flows all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. It is WIDE, and fast-flowing.

We took a motorized canoe about 45 min downstream to a small swath of virgin rainforest. The Yarina lodge is an ecolodge with a small animal reserve on the property for endangered animal rehabilitation. The lodge turns on its generators between 6-10pm, and there are 4 hours each day of electricity.

We spent a few hours with our Spanish teachers Julio and Janet. Brian saw a monkey while he was at his lesson, but I saw nothing.

After our lesson, we headed out on a jungle walk with our guide Froilan with his gigantic machete and shoulder knife. We saw lots of BIG bugs and butterflies, and learned about the ants that really hurt when they bite you, and the large but harmless tarantulas. There were some turtles, birds, and not too many other animals--they could hear us coming.

That night we paddled in tiny canoes to a small lagoon, and shined caymans with our headlamps. Their eyes glow red in the night, and we saw a few. The tree frogs were loud, and on the paddle back we saw a baby tapir hiding out in the underbrush.

It is hot 85+ degrees, and the humidity in the jungle is incredible, always hovering around 75% or more (read--nothing ever dries (poor brian)) and everything is musty and moldy.

The rest of the week was similar. Excursions in the jungle (la selva) and lessons. We saw monkeys every day, frogs (sappos), and tree frogs (ranas), more ants than you can imagine, and lots of birds including a bird called the oropendula whose call sounded like dripping water amplified 1000 times. We saw caymans, but no snakes.

I learned how make a backpack out of vines and palms, and about a lot of medicinal plants and trees. There is a parasitic tree called the matapalo thatclimbs othertrees, and kills them,and in the process sends down huge root vines that make great swings. They´re like the junglegyms of the Amazon, and quite exilirating to swing on.

Just when we thought that we had drunk the lodge out of beer, a boatload (literally) of old folks from the USA arrived, and another couple of cases arrived along with them.

There were some resident tarantulas that lived on the ceiling of the main lodge, and one night a big brown one decided to pay Brian a visit by dropping straight from the ceiling onto his head. Eric and I heard a huge thump, and the next thing we knew, Brian was out of his seat frantically brushing his chest. Not having much to hang onto atop Brian´s head, he slid down and got a good grip on his chest. Brian handled it all with much more grace than either Eric or I could have, and didn´t even so much as let out a yelp. He did hop out of his chair pretty quickly though.

Our teachers were hilarious, and they´ll be joining us at the coast next week.

One final note. There are really a lot of interesting things here in Ecuador, one of which is their love of mayonaise. There are mayo flavored chips for goodness sakes! From the time we arrived at the lodge, all of the condiments sat on the table, all day, in the heat--including the mayonaise. The expiry date hadn´t passed, but the bottle did suggest storing the opened product in the refrigerator. . .

One night after a few choice beverages, we all had a lively conversation about the mayonesa, and Julio informed us that a few years back there was a popular song complete with music video and dance about, you guessed it, mayonesa. We´re looking forward to sharing it with you all when we return. Until next time. . .