Jungle-icious

OK, first let me apologize for waiting so long to finish describing this whole jungle experience (I know you were all hanging on the edge of your seats huh?). I'm going to make this brief, and just sort of give an overview of the rest of the trip, as much for your sakes as for my own.

Our days in the jungle generally consisted of three meals eaten in the village which were cooked for us by one of the local women. The guide had food brought in for us from the city to "prevent depletion of their resources", though I suspect also as an attempt at comfort. This mostly consisted of rice, soup, some fruit, and a loaf of white bread. There were some seriously inaccurate calculations somewhere along the way and this "western food" ran out about day four. After that we pretty much ate yucca and.... no wait, yep, just yucca. This proved to be a fairly uncomfortable diet for someone not accustomed to so much starch and I even got a nice little starch belly (which disappeared days after departure thank goodness). Between breakfast and lunch we would usually go on jungle walks with Abel, our 23 guide from the city, and Gustavo, our local guide. This generally involved trudging through knee-deep mud (don't worry, we had rubber boots on at all times) and occasionally crossing bridges over streams (and by bridges I of course mean trees cut down over the river). The foliage was incredibly thick (as you'd expect in the jungle) and we saw an amazing variety of flora and fauna. Our guides would frequently stop to explain the use of different plants--everything ranging from medicinal to edible.

We encountered a fair amount of animals while we were out wandering (millions of species if you count bugs). Our guides were extremely enthusiastic about searching for monkeys, I think that somewhere along the way they got the idea that tourists are obsessed with monkeys and will not be happy unless they see them every day. So we spent a good amount of time scanning the canopy for primates and spotted some at least five or six times. But by far the coolest animal we saw was an anteater that walked right up to us and then stayed around for awhile climbing trees and searching for food. It was pretty amazing. It frequently rained, which made the jungle walks considerably less comfortable and the mud infinitely deeper. I must say I also thoroughly enjoyed our guides various animal calls throughout the trip.

There were definitely some amazing experiences in the jungle, but by the end, I was more than ready to leave. This unfortunately did not happen as planned (as nothing really did). On the day that we were supposed to leave there was bad whether in Shell (the city the plane leaves from) and we couldn't fly out. I don't think I have ever been more devastated in my life. Wait, that's not true, on the THIRD day of waiting with still no sign of a plane I was significantly more devastated. Finally, at the end of the third day our salvation arrived. The plane had left just as bad weather was rolling into Shell and the pilot was freaking out and yelling. At one point we were in the air in the middle of a gray cloud where we couldn't see anything, I really thought we weren't going to make it.

Because of our delay in the jungle we ended up missing our flight back to the States and couldn't get out for another week. At first this thought was horrifying, but after a massage and a facial and a couple of days in incredible Colonial Quito at churches and museums, my hope in life was restored.

It's been almost three weeks now since we've been home, and the whole experience is getting rosier in my memory. Though I do STILL have bed bug bites that itch every once in awhile. I'm not sure if I'll ever be completely healed.