La Amazonìa, Reserva Geobotanìca, Salsa dancing, Cuenca

We have been awful at writing in our blog, but it's because we are having such a wonderful time!!!! We have been traveling a ton, refining our salsa dancing skills, and realizing that we have less than a month left of our program.

Since the last post, we have gone to the Amazon, gone to a few different paramo parks, gone to Cuenca, and made it to the beach another time, and lots of other stuff. But these are the only things we'll write about in thist post.

We'll start from the Amazon (at least what we can remember). We left super early in the morning and we took a bus that traveled through various ecosystems (the paramo, cloud rainforest, and the rainforest!). Jane slept most of the way, but Amanda was a trooper and watched the ecosystems change. Jane finally woke up all sweaty and hot because we were in the tropical rainforest! When we first got there we went to a zoological refuge where we saw lots of tropical animals like toucans, monkeys, tigrillos, parrots, etc. Then we got on a canoe and were on it for over an hour until we got out to this lodge in the middle of nowhere called Yakuma Eco-Lodge. This is a beautiful lodge where there were lots of cockroaches, which was a problem because Jane left her backpack open and we found lots of cockroaches in there and Jane was a pansy about it, so thank goodness for Amanda! The next day we went on a beautiful hike through the jungle and saw so many cool plants.

On this hike, we went into a bat cave! There was lots of bat excrement and one bat even peed in our friend's eye. Gross! After the hike we went in tubes down the river. We floated down the Napo River at sunset holding hands, salsa dancing in our tubes. It was really a wonderful experience.

The next day we went and tasted the fruit of cacao and zapote and Amanda ate a fried worm. We met an indigenous shaman who gave us chicha which is this drink that is chewed before eating, but ours drink wasn't chewed. It tasted kind of gross. In the afternoon, we used this blow gun thing. Then we went to an island of birds and watched birds and ate fruit. Amanda got stuck in some mud a few times, so Jane laughed at her. That was definitely a bad idea to laugh, because right after, Jane slipped off of a log bridge into a marsh that went way above her waist. Luckily she put her arms up and saved her camera, but it was a wet and stinky trip back to the lodge. That night we had a campfire where we obnoxiously sang songs, like the gringas we are. The next day on our way out, we went on another hike to a beautiful waterfall that was beautiful, but kind of rough because it was so slippery. All in all, it was a great trip, minus the fact that there was NO chocolate in the Amazon for us to eat. So, when we got back, we went with our friend Emily, in a taxi, through the McDonald's drive-thru (the Auto-mac) to get Snickers McFlurry's and since the taxi driver was so helpful, we got him some McDonald's too. It was embarrassing, but those McFlurry's were great!

The next trip we went on was a day trip with a couple of our friends to la Reserva Geobotanica Pululahou that is near the middle of the world (Mitad del Mundo). It's a volcanic crater that we hiked down into where an indigenous farming community lives. It was beautiful, except for the dog that followed us the ENTIRE way up that had diarrhea the whole time. Other than that, it was wonderful.

We are also refining our salsa dancing skills. Now that our group lessons are over, we went for a semi-private lesson that was wonderful! Almost every Wednesday we go salsa dancing to practice. We were learning so much more from the semi-private lesson, that we're going to sign up for private lessons. We plan to come back professionals.

About a month ago, six of us went to the beach, to a place called Tonsupa. It was relaxing and wonderful except for when Amanda decided to climb a rock and made her foot bleed like crazy, so we had to go to the Red Cross of Ecuador to get it cleaned by a man without a shirt. She's doing better now, especially after her ride on a quad with a couple of military men. We ate lots of yummy food, which was great.

We can't really remember what we've done, but first weekend of April, we took a flight to the colonial city Cuenca. It's the third biggest city in Ecuador and it is beautiful. We had a great time and we stayed at a very nice cutesy hostel called El Cafecito. Besides the fact that our bed was very hard, we liked it. We went on one of those double decker bus tours, which was so much fun! We felt like tourists, but it was a great way to get to know Cuenca. We went to a beautiful mirador (lookout) that looked over all of Cuenca.

We also went to the National Park Cajas about an hour away from Cuenca, which turned out to be quite an adventure. Three of us were taking a later airplane home on Sunday night (because the other flight was full), so we decided to go to this park. We had just taken an exam in our diversity class and we had just learned about this ecosystem, the paramo, into which we were going. Somehow though, things did not click and we all went in thin sweaters and regular shoes. We started hiking and it was drizzling just a little. After living in the Pacific NW though, this did not bother us much. On the way back though, things got rough. It started pouring rain, the trail got very muddy, Amanda fell flat on her face, and we got completely soaked through. We got back to the visitor's center and went to go wait for a bus (which we later found out, was not a place where buses even stop). We got so incredibly lucky though because there was an old man, his son, and his grandpa coming back from a fishing trip at this park who luckily took us back to Cuenca in their car. These were such nice people and we were so happy to be in their warm car. Although it was a rough trip, Cajas was beautiful.

In the next post we will update on the month of April: THE GALAPAGOS!, Andrew's visit, Montañita, Baños, Papallacta, parilladas (bbq´s) and more!

P.S. We are so sorry for being so bad at writing in our blog. We wrote most of this post a few weeks ago, and we just had the opportunity to finish it. Things got busy with the end of the semester fast approaching. We are having a great time though and we miss you and we can't wait to share all of our adventures with you in person.