Blogs from East, Ecuador, South America - page 12

7 December (day 44) - Journey to the jungle We are definitely not going to be taking up careers at sea any time soon. James still felt dizzy this morning. We got to the airport with loads of time before our 9am flight. We sat waiting for our flight to be called and were slightly confused that our flight number came up on the board but it had Coca as the destination instead of Lago Agrio. We were told there was a connection to Lago Agrio so we boarded the plane. After 30 minutes we landed at Coca and were told we had to transfer. We collected our bags and were pointed towards a bus. We were very confused but got on the bus and after having our boarding passes checked we were on our way. ... read more

Travelled from Cunca to a lodge next to the rio Verde. Nice and warm bit of rain though you´d expect this in a Cloud Forest Went canyoning, abseiling, zip wiring and scariest for me was a 6m jump into a waterfall pool Heading off to the real jungle soon, so we´ll drop 1000m to about 600... read more

Hello hello hello! We are getting back on track with the updates after spending four glorious days in the jungle. We were both excited about the trip, but a little nervous. We expected it to be a hot couple of days, with lots of biting insects and the like, and overall we thought it wouldn't be the most relaxing part of the trip, but important to round out our view of Ecuador. Boy were we wrong! The weather was excellent, very hot in parts (the three hour jungle trek comes to mind) but never unbearable. and the bugs... there were more bugs in Quito than in the jungle! We began by taking a three hour bus trip from Lago Agrio to the Cuyabeno Reserve entrance. We got to meet up with our group, two wonderful ladies ... read more

We left Papallacta in the direction of Tena. We had had enough of mountains and high altitude, as I (Ram) realised that my lungs cannot really aclimatize to the altitude. We thought that a change in direction and a detour of the Andes via Tena and then to continue back up to Baños would be a good idea. Liz didn’t resist even though she really wanted to take the horse ride trip around Cotapaxi. We thought that maybe from Baños we hop to Cotapaxi later. When we arrived in Tena we met Stephanie, a Swiss girl, who joined us at the hostal we stayed and later on became our trip partner for about 2 weeks. As Ram primarily prefer to do trips without a guide he was happy to find a routes map in the hostal ... read more

Disclaimer: This is a lengthy and, could be deemed, slightly dull account of our time in the Jungle including in depth descriptions of the tribe we visited, their history, geographic info on the Amazon region and my insights on Western life in comparison to the Indigenous groups of this area. As such, don´t subject yourself to this if you are not interested in it. I will do a quick overview later on when we have time which will be a shorter and easier on the brain cells. Leaving Quito After 3 weeks, we felt we were ready to leave Quito for the Jungle especially when the Ecuadorian´s fascination with urinating in public was again demonstrated to us, on the way to the bus stop. A man in a suit was peeing on the bonnet of somebody´s ... read more