Blogs from Tena, East, Ecuador, South America - page 10

After a crazy 7hr bus ride from Lago Agrio (mad driver; cobbled roads; knackered bus and pitch black narrow roads) and no sleep I arrived at my hostel and aprehensively ran the bell at 3.30am. Didn´t seem to matter and after 5 days in the jungle a hot shower was soo fantastic. That day I booked onto a white water rafting trip for the next day. There were 4 of us and it was a lot of fun. We managed to flip the boat and create chaos, but along with lots of games in the boat and facepainting midway and a beer to round off the day it was a lot of fun... read more

Ten years after my first rafting experience in Albury, New South Wales, I Finally got to go whitewater rafting once again. And it was great! All the thrills that I expected and much more... Tena is Ecuador's whitewater capital and the river that we rafted in, Rio Misahualli, was used to practice for the World Championships in Baeza (2005 I think). Tena is north of Puyo, where I volunteered at the Santa Martha rehabilitation centre and seemed further into the jungle than I was before. It's such a great feeling as you are heading up, feeling the warmth and seeing forest for miles around... I did a Class 4 day trip and apparently the river was now only half or three quarters its actual volume, so I can't even imagine rafting in full swell, that would ... read more

Hello all, I´ve been a but lazy about posting, so I want to assure everybody that I am in fact still alive, and still in Ecuador. I finished teaching in mid May, and fortunately the last two months ended up being a great experience. I became comfortable teaching, the students got used to me and my Spanish improved to the point where I could actually run something resembling a class, on top of that I had the 88 coolest students on the planet in my school, which helps. However, my last week ended the same way my time in the community started - in the rain and with me not knowing what was going on. During this week, while I was administering a test, the caretaker of the school led a ram in and bound the ... read more

The road was rough and windy on the way to the jungle. We drove through Puyo and past Tena. Parking up next to the Rio Napo, we took a 10 minute boat road to the lodge where were staying, the Anaconda Lodge. We passed a really flash lodge first so we were a little disappointed when we arrived to our lodge which was a lot more basic with a few disused buildings rotting away as well as some half built buildings. Our room was a simple wooden room with netting instead of windows. The room was in a building of 6 rooms. On stilts and all wooden, you could feel and hear every movement that other people made. But we did get mosquito nets and later we would find that the owner, Adonis, and his ... read more

Well, we made it back from our Jungle Tech Trip. WOW!!! The jungle was everything I though it would be and more. We left last Thursday from Cayambe and drove to a town east of Quito called Baeza. Baeza is in the cloud forest (not jungle) and was home to the 2005 world rafting championships. There was not much to the town, however, the visit to the organic farm and agroforestry project developed by the municipal government was awesome. We learned how to make a fertilizer stew using goat shit, molases, a plant called ahi (like hot peppers - it is a natural insect repellant), alfalfa, goat milk, yeast, and water. It was definitely an interesting brew. After doing that, we learned more about developing worm beds to create fertilizer for crops, then we had a ... read more