Welcome to the Jungle! (part 1)

Hello all! I realize it has been long time no blog for me. My first few weeks back I tried to do some exploring, but never got around to blogging, and then my position as Social Media Captain for Sawah Bali (see my earlier post here) really began to take over. We have been working hard to start our crowd funding campaign as well as getting together the first news letter. Oh and I still have my day job of teaching too...

no electricity has never made
me more thankful for
my headlamp

As many of you may know, I will be returning back to the US in just two weeks now (at the end of this cycle). Before my time with Ecuador comes to an end, I tried to make a sort of Ecua-bucket list, or really places I felt I needed to see before I left.

This past weekend was Carnival meaning that we had a long weekend. I decided I would take this opportunity to get back into NATURE! I planned myself a trip to the jungle. I found an amazing jungle lodge called Cotococha right outside of Tena, which is about 5 hrs (by bus) east of Quito. This lodge has no electricity in the cabins and no wifi, so it sounded like just what I needed. (Though I would have liked to go deeper into the jungle, the four days off wasn't enough time to go out to a place that would involve about 10 hours of travel each way.) The saga of booking could be another blog post all together, feel free to ask if you really want all the (typical) details (of struggle).

I was extremely excited for my vacation. We had work on Friday, so I decided to leave very early Saturday morning. Turns out this was totally the way to do it since travel was CRAZY on Friday with everyone trying to escape the city (most people head to the beach for Carnival). I arrived at the south bus station around 6:30 and was able to hop on a 7:00 am bus direct to Tena.

I had typical bus company. A few screaming children, people trying to sell things, and my personal favorite: the woman and her teeny black toy poodle sitting next to me who I watched share breakfast.

I got to Tena around 11:45 (we made really good time, minimal traffic luckily), and before heading off to the lodge I went in search of some food. I will say it's a completely different feeling wandering around in one of the smaller cities. With my big back pack and painfully pasty white skin. I clearly stick out as a tourist, but there is not the same type of anxiety you feel when in Quito. I wandered up a main street for a while and found a small shop where I got a yuca pastry filled with cheese and a HUGE orange/carrot juice. This is when I was reminded of how EXPENSIVE living in Quito is (in comparison to the smaller cities that is). After I hopped in a cab (once again, any cab is safe, not the same sense of big city danger) and took a 20 minute ride to my secluded jungle lodge.

When I arrived I was greeted by the very small and friendly staff. I was given the whole lowdown (they asked English or Spanish, I said Spanish. It was a good weekend of practice!) I was shown to my cabin and told that if I wanted to shower I should use the biodegradeble products available to me (part of the reason I chose this place was because of how ecologically friendly it seemed).

I was exhausted from my week and all my early mornings so naturally the first thing I did was take a nap...

...but then I woke up and decided it would be a good time for me to take the self-guided walk around the grounds. I walked down the river (about 50 steps from my cabin, though I did not have one of the cabins ON the water), and then headed into the jungle. It felt so good to breath in REAL air again!

Of course there were some questionable parts of the path, not limited to the "bridge" above, but over all it was a nice little loop.

I will truly miss the creative translations

I headed back to my cabin to grab my kindle (that and my camera were the technology I brought with me), and headed into the main meeting area to settle into seat before dinner and get some reading done. The noises proved we were truly in the jungle, but natural noises are so much easier to deal with than honking cars and sirens!

Dinner was at 7:30 each night. The food was always very beautifully presented. The first night I ate turkey, which I considered to be extremely un-Ecuadorean, but good none the less!

After going to bed at 9 (ohhh it felt SOOO good), and being woken up in the middle of the night by POURING rain (in the jungle for sure), I woke up at 7 the next morning for breakfast (all meals included as part of the weekend) to go on my first day of adventure in the jungle...