.... ting, tang, walla walla bing bang!
Home from the amazon, and I will be the first to say it was the trip of a lifetime!
The trip started out thursday night at 8:00, when we [Kourtney, Rose, Karlijn, and I] boarded the bus to Quito. We rode all night which, in the rainy season, is not exactly a walk in the park; every time we finally nodded off, the bus rode over a gigantic pothole and we were back where we started from. We finally arrived in Quito around 5:30 or 6:00, freezing, feeling grimy, and ready for a nice warm breakfast. We stopped in Le Petit Cafe and got hot cocoa, grilled cheese, eggs, croissants, the works!
From there we boarded our little puddle-jumper plane with the other 12 exchange students en route to Coca. We stopped in Coca long enough to use the bathrooms and canoodle with the domesticated monkeys and birds, then got in the canoe for the 3 hour ride to Yachana, which in the native Quichua means "Learning". Upon arrival we wer informed by the head guide for our group, Juan, all the need-to-know basics about the trip: what hours we'd have electricity, powered by solar panels and biomass; meal times; towel and sheet rotations, etc. etc. We were also assigned our boots: Black rubber rain boots that we would be wearing daily for the duration of the trip.
The lodge itself was nothing like I'd expected. The other students said they were "cabins", so I expected candlelight and splintering floorboards and a hose in the shower, haha. I was reeealllly pleasantly surprised when we got to our room: 2 REALLY comfortable twin beds, a hot shower, ceiling fan, cubbies to hang and organize our clothes, and a small porch with a table and a hammock. The food was above my expectations, as well: Hot coffee and teas, granola with warm milk, fruit upon fruit, fresh juice, eggs and bacon and pancakes for breakfast, hot soups, rice, meat, and veggies for lunch, fruit cocktails for dessert, and heaping plates [with themes] for dinner: one night was what we believe was American Night, because we had chicken with barbecue sauce, potato salad, a garden salad with ranch dressing, and lemonade- YUM!
Much of the trip is a blur, a fun and fast paced and amazing blur. We hiked, long and hard, for a minimum of two hours a day and a maximum of five. We visited the nearby highschool, where the students learned not only english, math, and sciences, but also handcrafts, agriculture, and worked at the lodge, building steps on tricky parts of the trail, interning as tour guides and assistant cooks, screen-printed souvenir tshirts, you name it-they learned it. We watched a couple pan for gold; a backbreaking, low-tech job that earns $20 a gram... and the couple has 12 children. We ate bugs!, both living and roasted. We had a great balance of busy activities and downtime, which we spent swinging in the hammocks, playing carcds, doing our nails [of the 16 of us, 14 were girls], and relaxing in our beds. We made baskets and sang songs and taught the guides cardgames like Bullshit and Spit and got to know the other students a lot better at the same time. By the time we came home on Tuesday, we were begging to stay!
The canoe ride on Tuesday morning was shorter because we were going downstream. We arrived in Coca about an hour before our flight, puddle-jumped back to Quito, had lunch at Pizza Hut, and were on our way back to Guayaquil by 4:30. Unfortunately, because of the weather, the trip back was longer than it had been the last time we went, and we arrived at the Guayaquil terminal at 2 in the morning, exhausted and grimy all over again!
I'm glad to be back in Guayaquil, but glad at the same time to have had such a wonderful opportunity. It was definitely a highlight of the year!
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