An adventure leading up to an adventure:
I just got owned by the Ecuadorian jungle. Let me tell you how it happened. So the story really begins on a Monday. Monday was our day off after a long, crazy busy week. We took a bus to the beach about an hour away in Manta. We spent the whole day at the beach, which was rather enjoyable, but also rather tiring as the sun seems to zap me of all energy. At the end of the day, we took the bus back to Portoviejo. When I got back to my house I had 15 minutes to change and then we were off the soccer game. We played on a really nice outdoor field. It was a fun game. I scored a goal and sweated more than I ever thought possible. After the game we went back to our house. As quickly as possible I got cleaned up from the game, ate a ridiculously late dinner, and packed up my stuff for the next day’s jungle adventure. When I was finally all packed and ready to go, it was somewhere around 1am and we had to leave at 7am for our adventure. In the morning I groggily rolled out of bed, tired and sore from the previous night’s soccer game and completely clueless about the day that was to come. The adventure started with driving in a 1970s pick up truck and after a series of mechanical difficulties, we had to stop to get everything back in working order. Getting everything repaired ended up taking close to an hour and a half. During that time I sat in one of the other trucks that was with us and chatted with people for a while. I then promptly fell asleep with my face in my lap for a good 20 minutes. Finally we got back on the road again. We stopped to eat lunch along the way and when we got out, the pastor told us we had 10 minutes to eat before we needed to leave again. I shoveled in my cheesy potato banana something or other and downed a glass of watermelon juice at lightning speed. And then we were off again. Somewhere along the way the windshield wipers, that had been fixed just hours previously, stopped working again. This was a bit problematic as it was raining outside. We stopped and rigged up the windshield wiper so it would work again. They attached a giant rubber band to the windshield wiper on the driver’s side. They also attached a rope to it that ran across the windshield and wrapped into the passenger side where I was sitting. And I became the windshield wiper. I had to pull the rope that was countered by the rubber band over and over to clear the windshield. And evidently I need to do a little more work with pilates bands because after an hour my arm felt like it was going to fall off. Somewhere between 3-4pm we made it to the city of El Carmen where we picked up another team, inhaled some chicken, and finally got to use the bano. Then we were off again��”driving, driving endless driving. We drove through beautiful landscape of lush green mountains and finally made it to the trail head. We packed up some mules with all of our backpacks and were ready to head out. The time is now 8pm. It is pitch black and this is where the jungle adventure really begins.
Now, this is what I was told about this jungle adventure. It was going to be 2-3 hours of hiking through the jungle- sweet, that sounds like a cool experience and totally doable. It was going to be muddy- no biggie, I was rockin my newly acquired rain boots, a little mud no problem. So here we are at 8pm, we’ve already been traveling for 13 hours and just a quick 2 hour hike is separating me from curling up on my nice cozy sleeping mat. So I thought, but how incredibly wrong I was…
