The Amazon and Cartagena

Three weekends ago, while the rest of Quito headed west to the coast to celebrate Carnival, my fellow Americans and I went east into the Amazon Rainforest. Our hotel, the Yacuma Ecolodge, was a little resort run by the indigenous Quechua community located in the middle of the jungle. In fact, the only way to get there is a half hour motorized canoe ride.

With the ecolodge as our home base, we did a lot of half-day trips to learn more about the jungle we were surrounded by. We visited the AmaZOOnico, a reserve for Amazonian animals that can't be released back into the wild, usually because they've become too domesticated to survive. We saw huge snakes, ocelots, a ton of obnoxious parrots, and a few species of monkeys.

("Don't eat the dates, Indy!")

Another one of my favorite outings was the tubing trip down the Napo River. We took a canoe about an hour upstream (at one spot, the river gets incredibly shallow, so we had to get out and wade through 2 foot deep mud to find a deeper spot in the river), took a brief break to watch our guide pan for gold (it takes about 12 hours of work to get a gram of gold), then jumped in our inner-tubes and floated back downstream for 45 minutes. It was definitely a little surreal to be lazily drifting down a piranha infested river surrounded by untouched primary forest. That morning, we'd gone on a three hour hike through the forest with our indigenous guide. We endend up playing a fun game of telephone, as the guide would mention to the first person "don't touch that plant", "look at that bug!" or " be quiet and walk quickly, that's an angry bee's nest", and we would pass the message back. A few highlights from the innumerable factoids and tree names we learned: the above ground roots of huge tree are used by the indigenous people as giant drums to communicate across long distances; termites are a natural bug repellant (see me looking doofy in the photo below); and the fruit of the cacao tree is delicious, but tastes nothing like chocolate.

For most of the following week, I was feeling fairly sick. After a few days of intense coughing, I finally gave in and went to the doctor for some meds. It was very important that I feel better by Tuesday (the 15th), because I was going to Cartagena, Colombia to see Kristen!!!

Cartagena is a city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia well known for it's fantastic beaches and other touristy activities. One of the things that surprised Kristen and I was that almost all of the tourists we met were from other Latin-American countries - almost no Americans or Europeans. None of the menu's were bilingual, all the vendors spoke to us in Spanish despite our obvious gringo-ness, and we only heard English a few times throughout the week.

Although we didn't make it to a few of the best known beaches (when we tried to find a taxi-boat, they tried to make us pay 2x our nightly hotel fee, which was just ridiculous), we did spent about two days on the beach (Bocagrande) two blocks from our hotel. It's a public beach, so there were thousands of vendors asking us every 15 seconds if we wanted to buy water, buy a beer, buy a clock built out of a ship's wheel, buy mangos, buy popcorn, get a massage, get hair extensions, etc. The massage women were scariest, since even after our repeated refusals, they occasionally just grabbed our legs and started rubbing. But the water was warm, the sand nice and hot, and the sun ridiculously strong, so we had a great time.

We also took a day trip to el Volcan Totumo, a mud volcano about an hour outside the city. The volcano is about 50 feet tall, with a pool of mud wide enough for about 10-15 people inside at the top. The density of the mud is such that we could float when we got in, but it was really hard to move around. So for the most part, we fruitlessly paddled in place, completely vertical, with our heads out of the mud and our feet not touching anything. Afterward, we went to the river to wash off.

On Friday night, we went on a Rumba Chiva tour of the city. With a Rumba band in the back row, us and about 20 other people got in an open air bus and drove around the city for the night, armed with 2 bottles of rum per row and our guide constantly asking "where's the happiest row?! The best dancers?! The row who loves Cartagena?!" to keep energy up. Our bus, along with every other Chiva in the city, stopped at one of the walls of the old Cartagena fortress and we all had a Rumba dance party on the wall for half an hour, which was utterly ridiculous. In addition to the usual night-time water, beer and maraca vendors, the walls had several "spectacles", including a real sloth, which you could hold and pet and get a picture with. Completely illegal, I'm sure, and again: completely ridiculous.

And now, after a really incredible few days with Kristen, I'm back in Quito. Every time I leave Quito for a trip and come back, it feels a little more natural to call it home. In contrast to a new city like Cartagena, I know Quito pretty well, and it feels comfortable and familiar. That said, it's also back to the reality of classes, essays and internships, which are nice sometimes, but considerably less exciting than exploring Colombia with Kristen. On the other hand, the Ides of March have come and gone, meaning that my time in Quito is half over. I still have plenty of time left, but it's time to start planning which things I need to make sure I get done in the next two months.