Amaze-onia

Hello everyone, I'm back! I know it's been awhile since my last post but I had a crazy couple of weeks filled with tests, presentations, and a broken computer so my blogging had to take a backseat to my grades and sanity.

As you may have guessed, this post is all about my recent weekend trip to the Amazon Basin which is something I never thought I would have the chance to say. As you can also guess from the title it was amazing. While the trip was short, and I didn't get to do quite everything I had hoped, I was still blown away by the beauty of the nature around me. Unfortunately, I don't have any wild stories about a run in with an Anaconda, but I did have quite the adventure either way. As my luck would have it, I started out my trip with a long bus ride and a lost air bnb.

So this trip started off promptly after my day at school with me rushing home, meeting with my traveling buddy, and speeding off to the bus station to then sit on said bus for about 5 hours. We were traveling from Quito, high in the sierras to the small town of Tena, nuzzled in the Amazon rainforest. As we slowly dropped in altitude I could actually feel my lungs filling with more oxygen than before. The air got warmer, and when I finally got off of the bus I could feel the water in the air clinging to my skin. Being high up in Quito we don't really get humidity and it was definitely an unwelcome change. It was about 8:30 and it was dark, and we were in an unfamiliar place so all that we really wanted to do was get to our air bnb and fall asleep. This is where the problem arose. My travel partner promptly logged onto her air bob account to pull up the address of where we would be staying and our taxi driver informed us that what we had pulled up was, as a matter of fact, not an address at all. From here we might think that maybe we can just give a name of our air bnb and he would know where to take us. Well the listing was entirely non-descriptive and gave no name of the hostel on the website. No problem right? We can just call the 24 hour service line!! Unless nobody answers, because that would be a problem. Nobody answered.

Our backpacks were almost as heavy as our eyelids and we finally settled for asking the driver to take us to the nearest hostel and pray that they had an open room. Thankfully for us they did. Hostel Guayasa in Tena ended up being a happy mistake. We paid $10 for the night and got an entire room meant for six people, all to ourselves. In hindsight, we could have ended up in a lot of worse situations. I put on my bug spray before I went to bed so I wouldn't get eaten alive and slept like a baby.

When we woke up the next day we decided to do a bit of exploring before we went out to find our hostel. We hadn't had any calls back and figured we could kill some time. My stomach was growling and I was ready for breakfast and lucky for me there was a bakery on every single corner, if not every 30 feet. The fresh bread was still warm from the oven and melted in my mouth. It was the perfect start to our day. We explored for awhile, finding nature paths and viewpoints, and trying to get it through our heads that we were in the Amazon rainforest.

When it was finally time for us to go find our hostel, we had a whole new adventure in store. Google maps said it was a 20 minute walk to the latitude and longitude coordinates we were given and we figured we could tough that out but what Google maps failed to tell us was that the walk was almost ENTIRELY uphill. At this point our lungs have gotten pretty strong from dealing with the altitude in Quito so this walk shouldn't have really been that bad. But when it's 80 degrees out and humid, it's not the oxygen that gets you, it's the sweat that refuses to evaporate off of your body. Our 20 minute walk ended up turning into about an hour because we walked up and down a single hill about 3 times trying to find the seemingly non-existent road that would lead us to our destination. After asking 5 locals, and getting blisters from our shoes, we finally found the entrance road and our hostel.

We arrived looking like we had just hopped in a pool, backs and feet hurting and in desperate need of a nap. We found the hostel manager, got settled and fell right asleep. We only woke up in time for dinner and that was about it. So sadly, we lost a whole day of things we meant to do like go to the zoo and see a waterfall, to find where we would be sleeping. The real adventure that we had in store was the next day because we had a white water rafting trip planned.

We woke up bright and early the next day for our rafting trip. After all of the bad luck that we had thus far we were a little afraid that the rafting guide wouldn't actually come to pick us up in the morning and that we would be stranded and left to find something on our own again. Thankfully, they did indeed show up and we were excited and ready to go. The company was called Aqua Xtreme and we had an amazing tour with them down the Jatun Yacu River. The guides were awesome and the rapids were great and with all of the heat, the water was so refreshing on our skin. I will admit, getting pushed in the water for the first time was slightly shocking, but once I got a taste of the water, all that I wanted to do was dive back in. The only thing stopping me was the little critters that may or may not have been swimming under my feet. I had heard a story the week before about a group of international students swimming in a piranha infested river and I was not ready to be quite that brave. Our guide assured us it was perfectly safe so I just spent some time floating on my back, looking at the trees around me and realizing "holy crap I'm floating down a river in the Amazon rainforest I can't believe that this is my life." The trip was overall amazing, we ate lunch at a small indigenous community where they were selling artisanal goods, and some of Ecuador's best dark chocolate.

It was just the right amount of relaxation and adventure and sadly we had to leave the next day. Tena was a very cute little town and the landscape around us was stunning even if we were distracted by our dripping sweat and itching mosquito bites. I am definitely planning on going back to the amazon basin, finding a zoo with an anaconda even though I hate snakes, and going on an excursion where I can take more pictures. Sadly, my pictures are lacking because I couldn't take my iPhone on the raft for fear of destroying it and fear of the wrath of my father if I did. Every day that I am here, Ecuador never fails to amaze me. One short weekend was not nearly enough, and made me realize how much more I need to take the time to explore while I'm here.

Whether I'm in the Amazon rafting down a river, or walking to the mall and seeing the mountains rising up so close in front of me that I can almost touch them, I fall in love with this country more and more every single day. It makes the thought of leaving all the more undesirable. With two months to go in Quito, and an extra month of travel in store, I can't wait to share all of my adventures, amidst all of the craziness that is school and travel.

Chao por ahora,

Claire