Blogs from Macas, South, Ecuador, South America

Have you ever lived in a place with candles, gas and headlights instead of electricity? Did you ever have to shake out your clothes before putting them on to make sure there is no scorpion sleeping inside? Did you ever have to wash dishes and clothes by hand in the river next door, brush your teeth, take a bath and drink this water there as well? Well, that’s basically the description of the living conditions in the Selva Vida project in Ecuador where I worked for 4 weeks as a volunteer. Living in the tropical rainforest - called Amazonas - in Ecuador was quite different from what I had imagined. What would you have imagined ? Little villages with people still dressed in traditional clothes, shamans, lots of exotic, wild and dangerous animals, dirty and dangerous ... read more

We decided to go into the Amazon jungle in Ecuador for purely practical reasons, the distance to/from the jungle is much shorter in Ecuador. Plan A was to go to Macas in the southern half of Ecuador's Amazon and try to find a Shuar guide - the Shuar tribe is most commonly known for its past ritual of shrinking heads. They are a proud people who have long defended their land and community and are the only tribe never to have signed any form of peace treaty. The back up plan was to go into the jungle in Coca in the northern part. The journey from Cuenca to Macas was bizarre, for the first 5 hours until the lunch stop in Mendez it was very windy, very rough road with mud and fords to contend with. ... read more