"Welcome to the Jungle! We got fun and games!"

So I just got back from what was an exhausting but awesome week in the selva (rainforest) of Ecuador. It started Monday morning at 8:00am, when we all piled into the bus that has become so familiar to us, and set off down the winding mountain roads leading out of Quito. We stayed in the mountains for a while, traveling along the Andes. This made for some incredible views along the eight hour bus ride, most of which I spent with my face pressed up against my window trying to take in every amazing sight.

We eventually stopped, after about two hours, at some natural hot springs that are the result of the volcanic activity in the mountains. This was a nice pit stop--the water was scalding hot, but wonderful, and many of us ran alternately from the hot pools to the cold ones which was definitely invigorating, as Faba had raved to us, but also just kind of masochistic. Regardless, a good time.

HOWEVER, we were only supposed to be stopped for about an hour before getting back on the road. It was almost noon, which was when they had told us to be ready to get back on the bus, so I went in the locker room to change. When I came back out, I noticed a bunch of the students from my program crowding around near one of the pools, some crouching, others running frantically and yelling, "Where´s Faba? Get Lenore!" I walked up and was confronted with the sight of Rebecca, one of the girls from our program, passed out cold on the ground. Apparently, she had stayed in the hot pool too long (which we had been warned about) and felt light headed, so she had sat down on a rock to drink some water. But almost right after sitting down, she passed out cold and hit her head on cement walkway on the way down, as well.

We all stood around her for what seemed like forever. She was out cold for at least five minutes solid, perhaps ten. Finally, Faba and the doctors that worked at the hot springs arrived and put towels drenched in cold water all over her and poured some over her chest and stomach. And sure enough, that did the trick and she came around, looking around at all of us somewhat confusedly. They put her in a wheel chair and went of to check all her vitals, so, while we were waiting, we decided to go ahead and have lunch (a picnic of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, queso, bananas, and oranges).

Eventually, we got back on the road and I reattached my face to my window. I looked at the huge, rising mountains around us and the clouds hovering over them; I watched the landscape gradually change from grass and shrub-covered mountainsides to jungle. It was like watching a painting--jungle as far as I could see and in the distance, the shadows of more mountain covered in more jungle. The air gradually became hot and heavy with humidity and it was around this point that we got a flat tire! So we had another break of about an hour or so where we all stood awkwardly in the dirt road, sweating and hiding our faces from the burning sun, while the bus driver, Faba, and Lenore´s compañero, Rick, helped to change the tire.

However, in the middle of nowhere on a seldom-traveled road, we had managed to stop more or less right in front of a little shack with laundry hanging on the porch. And gradually, as we stood around, children began to appear. First, a tiny little girl from the shack, then a slightly taller boy. They were both dirty and barefoot and stared at us shyly. We tried to talk to them, but they seemed more interested in staring at us and wondering about what these strange gringos were doing in front of their house than actually saying anything. At some point, the little boy ran off down the road and reappeared a few moments later with another, slightly older boy in a soccer jersey and shredded jean shorts. He looked at us suspiciously, completely silent.

Eventually, the tire was changed and we all climbed back on the bus and were off, but the children stood in the road by the bus and watched us wordlessly until we were out of sight. In the more rural areas like this, we received the same reaction, from people and animals alike. Anytime our bus passed anyone, they stopped and stared at us, brows knit in confusion and suspicion. Even the dogs sniffing trash in the street stopped and watched us pass by, as did the occasional chicken that we saw clucking in someone´s yard. It is strange to be the subject of such intense interest, especially when you are not even really doing anything other than passing through.

By dark, the heat was slightly alleviated and we finally arrived, turning down a dark, narrow lane that cut through the jungle, with a sign that read Aliñahui Cabañas next to it. We traveled for about ten minutes down this road, deep into the jungle. When we finally stopped and were able to get out, everything was dark around us. A man with a lantern and a GIANT black Great Dane met us and led us down a cobblestone pathway, through the trees, until suddenly the trees on either side disappeared and we were in a much more wide open area, with the occasional palm fronds, exotic flowers, and other plants growing near the pathways and across the lawn.

We immediately went to the dining room--a shelter with no walls and a roof made of intertwined leaves. After dinner, we were assigned cabins and all stumbled off into the darkness to find our rooms. By the time I got to my room and despite it being night, it was oppressively humid and therefore oppressively hot, so naturally I was drenched in sweat. And it was at this point that I was faced with the task of sleeping. So I laid down on my bed on top of my covers, staring up at the ceiling of our cabin with my two roommates and wondering how I would ever fall asleep.

Somehow, I did and in the morning, I finally was able to get a good view of where we were. The place was amazing! While the grounds were very open and cleared of most large trees, when you walked to the edge of the yard you were overlooking a wide, fast-moving river below, and beyond, trees--vegetation that was thicker and greener and wilder than any I had ever seen! And beyond that first line of trees, rising hills and mountains with more jungle covering them.

After breakfast our first day, we split into two groups--one group went with Faba and the other (my group) stayed with Lenore. The first thing my group did was a hike through the jungle--first the secondary forest, then the primary forest. Our guide pointed out medicinal plants and demonstrated the uses for some as we walked. At one point, he stopped and broke a branch off of a rather small, thin tree. He then split the branch down the middle to reveal a next of ants, thriving and moving within. He said they were lemon ants and that they lived in a symbiotic relationship with the tree. The tree´s branches were hollow, giving them a place to live, and in return, the ants produced a citric acid that protected the tree and they also protected the tree from other plants growing around it (hence why this particular tree, in a forest thick with vegetation, actually did not have anything around it for several feet).

Then suddenly, our guide shook some ants onto his hand and, without warning, popped them into his mouth. I just sort of looked on with a mix of fascination and horror. He then went around the circle of us, shaking some ants into each of our hands. Turns out, they taste like lemons (due to the citric acid they produce). Who knew!

The most amazing thing I saw, however, was the primary forest. And there was no doubt when we got to it. Whereas in the secondary forest there is a lot of undergrowth and everything is crowded and dense, the primary forest is more open and the trees are, to put it plainly, huge. Our guide stood talking to us for several minutes in front of what was the biggest tree I had ever seen in my life, but I could not pay attention to a word he said--I was looking up, my mouth agape and eyes wide. This tree was mammoth--it would have dwarfed dinosaurs! It has giant, spreading roots that almost formed giant walls because they were so tall and the thick trunk shot up for what seemed like forever. Apparently, this particularly tree is about 250 years old! I stood there, stared, and wondered about what this tree would say if it could talk, about what amazing stories it could tell! This tree had been around before the nation of Ecuador existed! Even before the US existed! It was amazing to think of what things this tree might have borne witness to throughout history.

Next, we tromped through the woods and were each dropped off in the middle of the jungle, about 100 yards apart, to have an hour-long solo. This meant sitting/standing/lying down in the jungle for an hour, alone, with no watch or camera or anything, and just thinking. I think that my first half hour or so was spent obsessing, Howard Hughes-style, about quarantining a little spot where I could sit down. I first had to make sure the plants and leaves were out of the way, that I was not sitting on some nest or hive. Next, upon noticing the cloud of mosquitos hovering hungrily around me, I put on my rain jacket and my hood so that only my eyes more or less showed.

However, finally, I began to relax and take in my surroundings--how loud the rain drops sounded as they came crashing through the tree limbs, how I could hear the distant sound of a truck on the road, the calls of birds. And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, it was over! I turned around in time to see Lenore, our guide, and the other students, waiting for me, so I got up and joined them on our trek out of the woods.

We returned to the lodge then for lunch and immediately afterwards, went thrashing into the brush toward the river. We walked through a little tunnel carved out of the bamboo and other vegetation growing near the river and emerged on a stony bank where a motorized canoe waited. We all piled in and immediately went zipping off down the river. Trees hung over the bank on either side of us and occasionally we saw another little canoe, people dragging a net through the shallows, children swimming.

After about half an hour, we pulled up to a bank with a set of step steps carved into the hillside. We hiked up them and emerged at an animal rehabilitation park (the name escapes me at the moment). A young man took us on a tour of the place, explaining to us about the animals--monkeys, parrots, toucans, etc. Many, apparently, had been pets at some point and rescued by their organization. As we walked through the park, a funny-looking little flightless-bird with puffy feathers on his body and a more or less bald head, followed us. He stopped when we stopped, walked when we walked. Apparently, he was a pet at one point and his kind are supposed to be social birds that live in a group, but because he grew up without others of his kind, he now thinks that any group of humans is his group and thus follows them wherever they go. He was very cute and funny, though it was certainly sad to think that he would not really be able to ever live in the wild.

After our tour, we were treated to some cold Cokes and Sprites by Lenore, which was a great treat since we were all pouring sweat by this point. Afterwards, we piled back in the canoe and headed back upstream to Aliñahui. We immediately were whisked back up the trail to the dining house, where our next activity began immediately--a lecture by a local shaman on the uses of shamanic practices within the indigenous groups in the area.

He told us stories and acted out how shaman had sucked out the illness from people, how they cleaned their souls. As he explained it, to become a shaman, the apprentice would have to essentially have tobacco that has been fermented in water poured down his nose. This is to clean his soul (aka. to make him vomit) and make him ready to receive the magic powers of the forest. He also then demonstrated how the apprentice would have to also have tobacco smoke blown all over his body and in his face on one of my roommates, Kristen. She sat respectfully and let the shaman encircle her in a cloud of smoke without so much as coughing.

However, Jenna was not quite so lucky--she got chosen for the demonstration of how a shaman would clean someone who had been suffering from bad luck, ill health, or the like. She had a bouquet of leaves shaken and dragged all over her body for about five minutes. She just sat there, laughing and apologizing. I just sat there, glad it was not me because I would have definitely been laughing a lot harder than she was (not necessarily because I thought it was funny but because I am super ticklish).

Essentially, I walked away from the shaman lecture with this: shaman are like doctors, only with more showmanship. Maybe a mix between a magician and a doctor, perhaps not with as much technical skill as a medical doctor, but with some actual real knowledge of medicinal plants and other techniques. Some of the people in our group were genuinely convinced it was real. While I have respect for it, I was not nearly so convinced (frankly, I cannot believe that a shaman sucked an actual bird out of a boy´s head because it was making him crazy, but then, everyone is entitled to their opinions).

We had dinner after the lecture, followed by a night walk around the grounds of Aliñahui to view the local insect life, which truly comes alive at night. I learned, for example, that the cockroaches we occasionally get in NC have NOTHING on the cockroaches in Ecuador (some of which are as big as my hand!). I ALSO learned that tarantulas are not actually as scary as I thought. The idea of tarantulas scared me a lot more than when we saw the actual thing. Our guide reached up into a spiderweb-filled hole in a tree and poked a hole in the webbing with a stick. He shined his light in and, voila! I thought at first I was looking at a small, furry rodent, but no, it was just a big-ass spider with fur, somewhat pissed off that we had disturbed it.

The small spiders in Ecuador, I discovered, are just as amazing as the big ones but because of what they make rather than their size. Apparently, the little spiders make big, communal webs that quite literally can be ten feet wide, spreading between two trees and reaching all the way to the ground! When we shined our lights on these amazing constructions (thank God, rather than walking through them by accident, which would have been a nightmare!), we were faced with huge, intricate webs, like constellations connecting the spiders and bugs that were their stars.

The most terrifying thing of the night, it turned out, was not the spiders or cockroaches, however. It was the ants. Specifically, the Conga ants. These are "big-ass ants with attitude," as our director calls them, and they are mostly solitary, though they do live in nests together. And they look just like a normal black ant, only much bigger. Apparently, should one of these little suckers bite you, you will be in immense pain and have a fever for several hours at least! Faba told us about how he once was bitten on the nipple by one and he had a breast for a week. Another story was about a friend of Faba´s who was climbing a tree and accidentally placed his hand on a branch with four Conga ants on it--they bit him, he fell, and he was unconscious before he even hit the ground as a result of the bites.

So, you can imagine my terror when, on our nightwalk, we came upon a tree with Conga ants literally crawling all over it. IMMEDIATELY, I dashed about twenty five feet away and began to sahke out my feet, my arms, everything, for fear one might have crawled on me or fell on me. And that night, in bed, I could not help but be startled from my sleep once or twice by visions of Conga ants climbing over my bed as I slept.

The next morning, we had breakfast and then took the bus to another river where Faba was waiting for us. His group from the day before would be going back to Aliñahui to do the previous day´s activities while we did theirs from the day before. We all followed Faba down a narrow, dirt road, past some tiny wooden shacks with chickens picking in the yards, to the school at the end of the lane. Or, to be specific, three small building made of cinderblocks and with tin roofs. They had windows, but there was nothing in them--only open air between the classes going on inside and us.

The teacher in one of the tiny rooms assembled the children before us--most of them barefoot and dirty but all smiling and looking at us curiously. They went down the line and shook each of our hands and then lined up and sang the Ecuadorean national anthem for us. After this, we went inside the classroom with them and spent about an hour talking and playing with them. I happened to end up at a desk with two little 7-year old boys named Diego and Paul. We drew for a while and colored--or, to be specific, Paul drew animals silently while Diego talked nonstop (though intermittently interrupted by a terrible-sounding cough that made me cringe inwardly).

Once we were done playing with the children, the teacher showed us into one of the other classrooms. Apparently, our classmates has painted its walls the day before and now we were instructed to paint murals to decorate the walls. I painted a frog, while the others painted hummingbirds, other animals, and scenes of people on the coast, in the sierra, and in the selva. The entire time we worked, people (I do not know who, perhaps people from the community) stood watching us silently from outside, their faces pressed in between the bars on the windows.

Once we had finished, we had lunch with the teacher and the other people who worked at the school. And, just as with everything, whether we were painting or riding on the bus or just eating, the women who had cooked, as well as the children, stood silently and watched every bite we took. Slightly unnerving, but whatever.

After lunch, we took a tour of the farm near the school where all different types of bananas, lemons, limes, oranges, and other fruits grew. I got to taste cacao--the source of chocolate, my addiction--fresh from the tree and it was not like anything I expected. Besides the fact that the fruit of the cacao tree is this giant, orange bean-shaped thing, you break it open to reveal soft, white, fleshy material coating the seeds. You do not bite them, however, just suck of the fleshy part. The seed is actually really bitter (I found that one out the hard way!). The flesh itself, while very sweet, does not taste anything like what I know as chocolate, so how they make it into chocolate is a mystery to me.

We also saw an achiote tree--a tree with fruits that look like strawberries, only they are hard and when you crack them open, there are numerous small, red seeds inside. These seeds produce an amazingly strong, bright red dye, like blood, that has been used by the indigenous people for centuries to paint their skin and hair. It is also now, apparently, used as a dye in numerous products sold all over the place. We, of course, had to test this out and spent about fiften minutes painting each other with achiote.

Upon getting back to the school from our tour, we were invited to play a game of soccer with the school children and a few older guys that worked in the kitchen to prepare our lunch. So, we had a face off between team USA and team Ecuador (with Faba playing for Ecuador because he might teach Americans and have lived there, but his heart is always in Ecuador). Now, I have to say that I do not profess to be a talented soccer player or athlete really in any sport involving hand-eye coordination. My first impulse when any projectile is launched at my face, as would be that of any person who grew up involved in sports such as running and swimming, is to scream and cover my face with my hands. And, unfortunately, I did in fact do just that on one occasion during our game.

Regardless of my performance, we were doomed from the start. Any Ecuadorean from the age of five and over is dangerous with a soccer ball. And besides that, we were playing, 13 of us to about thirty of them. And they may be small and barefooted and, in many cases, infected with worms, but can they play soccer! One of my friends described it as fighting zombies, because any time one of us got the ball, after about five milliseconds, we were descended upon by at least ten small children that only multiplied every second afterward until you were completely without hope.

Needless to say, team Ecuador beat team USA thoroughly, 7 to 2 (and we only scored 2 because, out of pity, two of the Ecuadoreans finally agreed to play for us). After our game, we walked down to the river and took a motorized canoe up the river just about ten minutes, arriving in front of what literally looked like paradise! A stony beach, with cute little cabins hidden behind a line of flowers and brush.

We were greeted by Tom, who welcomed us warmly to his Arajuno Lodge. He has lived there for decades with his Ecuadorean wife and is originally from Nebraska. We all dumped our things in our cabins and then gathered in the clubhouse/dining hall, which was completely open on the side that faced the river and had hammocks lining it, hanging from the ceiling. Here, we met Mona, who is a monkey that Tom and his wife rescued after seeing her chained up in a marketplace as a baby. The idea is that eventually she will go off into the wild, since there are other monkeys like her in the jungle all around the Lodge, but for now, she is still very much a baby and relies on Tom and his wife to survive.

I have to admit, after playing with her all that afternoon and the next morning, I could understand why people keep them as pets, because they are very personable, cute creatures. She was small and black, with incredibly expressive eyes and expressions. Her favorite game was for us to sit in one of the hanging chairs and she would hang off of the chain that suspended the chair from the ceiling, swinging in our faces and batting at our hands playfully. I genuinely hope she makes it back to the wild, but we were all a little curious as to how a monkey that has now become so accustomed to humans will ever be able to be wild.

The afternoon was free, for the most part--swimming in the river, swinging from the rope swing into the river, dinner, followed by Cuarenta (an Ecuadorean card game). Eventually, people drifted off to bed, but my cabin stayed up until nearly 2:00am, just sitting on the porch in the light of the nearly full moon, talking. It was an incredibly idyllic, peaceful place.

The sad thing about the Arajuno Lodge, which Faba pointed out to me at breakfast the next morning, was that Ecuador is preparing to construct not just an airport but a major international airport nearby. This will completely disrupt the ecosystem here, not to mention the quiet and solitude. Very sad to think that I most likely will never see that place the same way again, since it will soon be irreversibly altered like that.

After breakfast, Tom´s wife instructed us on Quechuan pottery--the history and the folklore surrounding it. Afterwards, we spent a little while making our own pots outside near her kiln. Once we finished with our pots, we went on a brief tour of the farm surrounding the Lodge, where they have many medicinal plants and fruits, as well, which was pretty fun.

After lunch, it was back into the canoes, goodbye to Mona, and back to Aliñahui to reunite with the other group. We spent the afternoon before lunch relaxing and catching up, since it felt like forever since we had seen each other, even though we were only separated for about two and a half days. To celebrate our last night (and Debbie´s birthday, one of the girls in the program), we went to the only bar around, called el Laboratorio. It was an open air place, built in the traditional style--a roof of intertwined leaves, etc. However, there were speakers blasting music and a disco ball rotating in the center.

We all danced, drank, and talked with the only other people in the place--some British guys who had just graduated from high school and were taking six months to travel through North and South America before starting college. All in all, a very fun and interesting night.

Today, goodbye to the Selva and a very long, exhausted bus ride back to Quito. I am VERY exicted about tomorrow, because I get to meet my new host family. I received a letter from them with information about them when I got back to Quito this evening: apparently, I have a host mother named Hilda, a host father named Marco, and three older host siblings ( a 30 year old brother, 24 year old sister, and 34 year old sister who lives with her husband elsewhere but visits often). I am very excited and, judging from their letter, they are very excited to meet me.

Until next time, ciao!

-Alex