Ecuador with the brothers!

I finally had time to finish my Ecuador recap now that school is out for Christmas! Sorry for those of you who were promised it weeks ago, but better late than never, right?

Last month I went on an 8 day trip to visit my youngest brother Zack in Ecuador, where he has been studying for the last 4 months. My other brother Kyle met up with us halfway through the week, and the three of us plus Zack's friend Shaka from APU spent 5 days in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve in the Amazon Basin, were we searched for anacondas, fished for piranas, and trekked through the jungle!

Memorable experiences of the trip were:

• The adventures starting before I even left Los Angeles: I walked into the terminal at 9 pm after taking a shuttle bus to LAX, only to be greeted with the news that the entire country was closed to incoming flights due to a minor plane accident at the Quito airport. The wheel blew on an Iberia jet as it landed, and it skidded off the runway into a field, causing a small amount of damage to the runway. The plane is still sitting in the field almost three weeks later! The delay meant that I had to use some of my carefully budgeted travel money for a hotel in LA, and I spent the next day wasting time in LA and hoping that the Qiuto airport would allow my flight on Saturday night to leave, which thankfully it did.
  


• landing Sunday afternoon in Quito, meeting Zack at the airport, and then immediately flagging down a bus in order to go to Otavalo, a small, very picturesque town up in the Andes. Boarding this bus was not quite like getting on the colectivos of Argentina - we stood on the side of a busy main road in Quito, and as the bus approached us, a man leaned out the door and yelled "OTAVALO!" When we nodded, he hopped off, grabbed my bag, yelled at us to "Sube, sube!", or "get on, get on," and pushed us on the bus before it even came to a complete stop.
  


• Otavalo - a beautiful town in the Andes, where we bartered over hammocks and alpaca scarves at their renowned artisan market, huffed and puffed our way around Laguna Ciococha, a 400 meter deep volcanic crater lake at 10,000 feet elevation, and sat down for dinner at a restuarant just as the entire town lost power, to have the menus whisked out of hands and be thrown back on the cold, dark streets, starving, where we wandered around before going back in to the restuarant to beg for food and eating by candlelight.



• Exploring Quito's old town, especialy climbing to the top of La Basilica's spires





• Traveling to our jungle lodge: we took a 9 hour overnight bus ride through the Andes, 3 hours of which was on a bumpy dirt road that did not allow the bus to go more than 5 miles an hour. Side note: My confidence in the buses was not improved when we passed this accident on our trip back to Quito: After the 9 hour bus ride, we then took a 4 hour car ride from a small town outside of the Amazon to the entrance to the national park we were going to, then a 2.5 hour canoe ride, 2 hours of which was in a tropical downpour.




• Every minute of our 5 days in the Amazon. Our first night we went out in the canoes to look for caimans, who you find by their glowing red eyes when you shine your flashlights in the banks of the river. The next day we went pirana fishing, tromped through the mud on an unsuccessful but still incredibly fun and exciting search for anacondas, watched the sun set over the Laguna Grande, and went on a night hike through the jungle, where we saw tree spiders larger than my hand, snakes, poisonous Conga ants half the size of my pinky, tarantulas, and grasshoppers the size of my palm. The next day we visited an indigenous village, found ruby poison dart frogs, visited a Shaman that still practices his healing ritual (which involves both healer and healee drinking ioasca together) for the local people, and found an anaconda sunning itself on a pile of branches over the river. Our last full day we went one a three hour hike through the jungle where our guide explainded how the indigiones people use the medicinal plants and trees. We tasted the tree they make anti-malaria medication from, drank tree sap that cures ulcers, and ate edible ants - they tasted like lemon! During the 5 days there we saw an incredible amount of wildlife, including turtles, freshwater dolphins, several kinds of bats, four kinds of monkeys, two kinds of sloths, five kinds of snakes, and countless birds: three types of toucans, two varietes of potoos, scarlett macaws (an endangered species), blue and yellow macaws, parrots, stinky turkeys, kingfishers, swallows, hummingbirds, vultures, herons, and woodpeckers, to name only a few.



• Watching water drain down a sink straight down directly on the equator, drain clockwise 10 feet into the southern hemisphere, and counter-clockwise 10 feet into the northern hemisphere.



• Spending time with my brothers, learning more about them as adults, talking nonstop about fishing, traveling, or politics, and not fighting...very much!