Merazonia

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So I just finished volunteering in the Amazon for two weeks, and it was probably one of the coolest two weeks of my life. It was very intense and very hard work, but very very fun.
The day was like this: At 7:30 sharp we start preparing food for the animals. Everybody is assigned a different round of creatures and we go and feed all their cages and give them food. This takes about 2 hours. Then we are each assigned a small chore to clean some area of the place. This is like clean the kitchen, or sweep the house, or (my favorite) collect grasshoppers and feed them to monkeys! Then we get assigned a job to do. This usually entailed carrying rocks and sand up mountains, or clearing ditches, or cutting things down with machetes. Actually you cut a lot of things down with machetes because the animals are constantly getting fresh leaves and trees in their cages. Ergo, I can now list machete skills on my resume. Anyway, so we do physical labor for like 4 hours with a lunch break in between, and then at 3 we have another feeding time to clean all the cages and feed them again. And then we are done at 5!

So it is a very long day and there is no electricity, so at night we cook a communal dinner by candlelight! I actually cooked a lot which was strange because Ive never cooked for lots of people before. But the animals were what made this such a cool experience. There was a puma, capuchin monkeys, tamarin monkeys, a howler monkey, woolly monkeys, TONS of parrots, kinkajous, a tortoise, and a turtle! whew, I think that´s all. Most of them are going to be rehabilitated into the wild so we weren´t allowed contact with them, but some we were.

Then, the last night me and some other volunteers my age i made friends with were getting ready to leave and there was a big storm that day (oh yeah, did I mention most of the work we did was done in pouring rain??) and for some of the reason the river got realllllly flooded. And this is a problem, because the refuge is reliant on the bridge to get to civilization, and half of the animals as well. So the bridge broke at one end, and the river was so swollen with flood waters but we were really determined to get out that night, so we ended up walking across part of the river where the bridge was broken with our backpacks held up! That was really kinda scary but we made it through alive! Anyway I´m going to go climb Machu Picchu on Wednesday and hopefully I´ll survive that as well. Yeeee!

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Photos

working hard in the rain!
this is the bridge that broke

Frieda!!!
my fave