I won the being bitten competition

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No surprises there. I tried counting in the shower on the final day, but gave up at 45, and I hadn´t even got to my left leg, which has a bumper crop. As if this weren´t enough, I also have three splinters and also one bite on my face (no less) which has got a bit infected and is really rather unsightly. I also forgot to take my malaria tablet one day (damn it damn it, another 3 pounds down the drain) and I´ll probably start having fits soon.

So, it wasn´t exactly good for my health. It was, however, just good. Proper good, in fact. I´d forgotten how much I´ve been wanting to go to the rainforest (rainforest, jungle, they´re interchangeable) since I was old enough to want to go to places. Actually, yeah, it probably was the first "place" I wanted to go to. For those of you who haven´t seen my bedroom in Chapel Lane, New Longton, the wallpaper is almost entirely obscured by pictures, mainly art posters I´ve bought or cut out. Anyway, is the rainforest one still there, Dad? I think maybe it was my very first poster, and I remember buying it in London one Christmas and being very pleased with it and looking at it from bed, thinking how amazing, I want to go there.

Therefore I´ve fulfilled a lifetime wish. Congratulations, me. The place is stunning. I love trees, and paths, and they´ve got those in abundance. Also animals like pretty birds, large insects, monkeys (various different types and quite a few of them), caymens (spelling? They´re mini-alligators, or crocodiles, don´t know the difference except that the former are reptiles and the latter amphibians, which doesn´t resolve what caymens are for me. They have red, reflective eyes and hang around on the river banks. Must move on now.), dolphins (supposedly pink, but too fleetingly visible for me to say for sure) and a sloth, two-toed.

We went on walks, spent a lot of time in the canoe, did some paddling in a smaller, much more uncomfortable canoe (which was when we saw the sloth, which is rare so all the better), watched a local woman make yuka bread (really not tasty except that I was hungry), fished for piranhas (damn it damn it, what was wrong with my hook and bait?), swam in the lake, got very very wet in terntial rain, saw a tarantula one night, learnt about what plants are used for by natives, blew a bamboo arrow out of a long pipe aiming for a vegetable (damn it damn it, something surely wrong with the flights), walked accross a tree trunk over a river (immensely scary as I had the beloved camara on my person) which then snapped when the guide and canoe man went on it, sending them plummeting and, oh, lots of other cool stuff.

The group was big and fun and very international. We had a round of 21s (the drinking game) for Sheryl´s (sorry if it´s "Cheryl", Sheryl...) birthday party, with instruction from the only Englishwoman, yours truly. It went down well, but only with those playing it. Everyone else in the camp, I think, was grossly peeved, as none of the buildings had walls (just rooves and ceilings and then you sleep in a mosquito net, which isn´t soundproof) and it got very funny and late. Ended up with:
cero
uno
dos
tres

bonjour
seis
siete
ocho
I love my guide
But I love Elizabeth more
once
beer
ciao
fourteen
sixteen
spider
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty-one

You can deduce who made up certain of the rules. was ancestral to the number 10, not crucial.

It took almost 24, unpleasant, hours to get there from Sunday evening to Monday evening,so I decided to skip the bus on the way back, and instead took the 25 minute plane, so I´m back in Quito. Again. Hoping to buy a Sunday flight to Bogota in the morning.

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