Greetings from Quito, the capital of Ecuador!
Teddi and I arrived today after spending the week at a lodge in the Amazonian Jungle (known as el Oriente aqui en Ecuador). I´ll attempt to make this entry short to sum up our first day, as our week was filled with many, many highlights.
Last Sunday, we took a plane from Cuenca to Quito. We left our Ecuadorian Family in tears and thanked them for all they had done for us. As it was Sunday, and there are always limited flights (good ol´Catholic country), we were only able to get a flight out at 11:30 in the morning and arrived promptly 35 minutes later at Quito´s crazy busy airport. Consequently, as we are learning in Ecuador, everything here takes twice as long and our connecting bus to Coca (small pueblo at the edge of L´Oriente) was not supposed to depart until 8pm. We were told by several students not to walk around Quito with our luggage even during the day, safety first! So… we made Quito´s international terminal our home base for 8 hours Sunday afternoon. Teddi and I like to vary our activites when spending long amounts of time at an airport, we immigrated slowly from the small, super expensive, strangly American-esk restaurant, to a Nescafe Coffee bar, to finally a small corner to read. We played cards, read books, drank coffee, watched golf on TV, and attempted to used the internet (although it was waaaaaaay to expensive). We got used to watching the families great loved ones at the airport, then leave, then more families would show up. It was a fun people-watching game, well at least for an hour, but not for 8!
¨Go to the McDonalds across from the Theatro and your teachers will meet you there.¨ These were our directions from the Escuela in Cuenca on where to meet our bus to the Amazon, ¨At a McDonalds? OK! Vamanos!¨ Of course, the gringos with the backpacking backpacks were very easy to find at the McDo, and, of course, we ended up getting a cab from the McDo to the actual bus terminal.
Once arriving at the terminal, we were told that the bus actually didn´t leave until 9pm! We had one more hour to wait! SO MUCH WAITING! We made friends quickly with the five other Americans in our group: Gabriel, a 16 year-old from Miami (who´s mother sent him here to study Spanish on his own so she could have some alone time), Diane and Holly (a mother and daughter from Alaska, later we would joke that Diane looked just like Bett Midler from Hocus Pocus due to her crazy curly, red hair), and Rob and Meridee (two friends traveling together from Houston). None of the individuals spoke Spanish and, consequently, none knew exactly what we were going to be doing in the Amazon either… so there we were the 7 gringos traveling blindly into the Ecuadorian Jungle.
¨The bus ride to hell¨
Around 9:30 (because nothing runs on time), our bus departed Quito. It was very similar to a Greyhound bus, however, with constant Mirangee music playing in the background. The nine hours that followed were a bit of a blur… Teddi and I were given the very front seats on the bus, right behind the door where the driver sang to music the entire 9 hours in order to stay awake (this did not sound exactly like the lullaby I was hoping for). The bus would stop every once in a while, once for fuses (because the VCR for the violent movie wasn´t working), another time for water for the driver, and several times for extra passengers along the way. Every time the bus would turn with the road, I would slam into Teddi, waking us both up, then the bus would turn the other direction, and Teddi would slam into me. For this reason, Teddi deemed this part of our adventure, ¨the bus ride to hell.¨
We arrived in Coca at 5am, just in time to see the sun rise (well, we would have if the river hadn´t been soaked in with fog). Our teachers, who had never really introduced themselves yet, used hand gestures to get us to walk in the direction of the lodge´s launch point at the river, I wasn´t really in the mood to speak Español at 5am! We met several dogs along the way, on our 15 minute walk… and that´s about it. My first impression of Coca was that it was a ghost town.
We were originally told that after taking an 8 hour bus ride, we would then transfer to a motorized canoe to get to the lodge. After walking to the launch point, we were told that we would have to wait AGAIN! Our canoe was not going to depart until 11:00am! I was quickly learning the true meaning of Ecuadorian Time, such a wonderful thing!
Our profesores dropped us off at the most Gringo-esk looking restaurant in Coca for breakfast around 8 am. They helped us get a table and then left to go eat at what I assumed was a non-gringo-esk eatery for breakfast. After a quick hour of eating, our professors returend to help us buy bus tickets to get back to Quito on Friday. The 7 gringos looked at each other and after realizing that the bus would be another night bus, we agreed that it would be, although less adventurous, much more efficient to fly back to Quito. We spent quite a bit of time walking back and forth, back and forth, between the two airline company offices (LAN and TAME) to figure out which flights would work best given the lodge´schedule and our own. We finally made our way back to the TAME office and booked the last seats on the plane.
Life lesson #1, when in the Oriente, make sure you have a sure way to get back to civilization.
I´m pretty sure I slept in a chair for the next three hours, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, while waiting for the motorized canoe. It started to rain when the canoe (which was actually a long banana boat with two HUGE yamaha outboard engines on the back). Even in the rain, I´m pretty sure I slept on that boat ride, as I hardly remember a thing.
The Yarina lodge is on a smaller river that connects to el Rio Napo, it consists of cute cabañas made of bamboo and palm, and, miraculously, has running water and bathroom facilities in every cabin. We arrived, ate lunch, and immediately our professors told us that we were going to have class on the deck of the lodge. Vamanos, let´s learn Spanish so more!
So there we were, Teddi, Diane, Holly, and I, stinky and exhausted attempting to learn the present tense in Spanish. I quickly learned that, unlike my teacher in Cuenca who had a gift for teaching, my new teacher, PePe, did not. He taught directly from the book, had us do exercises, and disregarded the benefits of conversational learning. BOO! After about an hour of class, he asked me, ¨Estas aburrida?¨ Translation: ¨Are you boared?¨ SI! Our class was originally supposed to be from 1-6pm, however, when we learned that the afternoon activity was pirana fishing, Teddi and I took advantage of ditching class so we could put raw meet on a hook and fish for piranas in the river. YUMMY!
The rest of our first afternoon in the Amazon consisted of Pirana fishing in several different spots, without having any luck, showering with a drizzle of cold water (apparently they run very low on water in the afternoons), and sleeping in a hammock. Teddi and I went to bed directly after dinner (7:30), I prayed that I would not get any visits from Tarantulas or scorpions, and passed out in my sheets that had been drenched in the humidity of the Amazonian Jungle. Fully exhausted, I realized I had lived and learned the essence of Ecuadorian Time!
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