I woke up to the same beeping after a fairly good night’s sleep. A couple of the kids complained about the noise of the rain or the animals, but I was totally out. And don’t think that the jungle it’s quiet. It’s probably almost as noisy as Quito. Anyway, I was faced with a minor crisis that morning because there was no water. I did everything (even put in my contacts) using water from a bottle I had and trekked on over to breakfast (cheese sandwich, bread with PB&J, juice because tang or lemonade was at every meal). The water came back on before we had to be at the library for our first hike, so I brushed my teeth and a volunteer handed out our boots, super rubber. I was in a group with Margoh, Dan, Brenden, and Daniel; we were the smallest. Our guide was named José, and he took us on the Churongo path, which is a type of monkey. The forest was a little scary. It’s that the path was pretty much always muddy and uneven, so I spent the vast majority of my time looking at my feet and praying that my knee wouldn’t give out. The trees and brush are really thick and really green. Daniel said that we were lucky because it was actually fairly cool, usually it’s like 100 degrees. I wore scrubs (recommended because they “dry” quicker) and a short sleeve t-shirt and bug repellent; I wore a hat not so much as protection from the sun but rather to keep anything mysterious from falling into my hair. José spoke quietly and asked us to stay quiet so we don’t scare the animalitos. The first thing we saw was this tiny little frog. It so really amazing, but we couldn’t touch it because we all wore bug repellent, which is poison. Thanks to that tiny little frog (well, it actually might have been a toad) I got a pretty good idea for my final project. José also showed us a kind of pink mushroom that the indigenous people (himself more or less included) use to disinfect the umbilical cord after birth. I finally got used to the terrain a little bit, and I saw this huge hole in the ground; José said it was from an armadillo, digging. Except this armadillo isn’t like the one in Texas; it’s more like the size of a dog or a miniature horse. We (meaning Jose) also found a pretty cool stick bug. At a couple of spots in the path, we had to cross a couple of streams over a few pieces of wood, which was pretty cool. And when I mentioned that the path is uneven, a lot of it has to do with roots. Sometimes they’re lifesavers because they hold in the mud, but sometimes they just try to trip you. The coolest thing is, though, that there’s very little nutrition in the soil in the rainforest, so the tree roots span out like crazy. The root you trip over could be a root belonging to a tree 30 feet (or was it meters?) away. Plus there were these super bright red roots, which are obviously super poisonous, so please don’t eat them. Jose also showed us military ants, which they use as staples if someone has a bad cut. He showed us, bringing the ant’s pincers to his skin. The ant latched on, and supposedly you could just pinch the body off and the pincers would stay and hold your skin together for a week or so. Jose didn’t want to kill the ant, so I used my longer finger nails to get it off him. The poor ant was really confused once I set it back on the log and went around in circles. I also saw some baby coconuts, smaller than my palm. He also gave us fruit to eat. It was more like a seed; you had to peel off the outside, eat the membrane, and spit out the pit. It was sour, kind of like lemon. Once Jose walked up to a tree, scraped off some bark with his knife, and gave us all a tiny bit to eat. It was so bitter! “This plant…” he began to explain, then drew his hand across his neck. He had fed us poison! Such a small amount had no chance of hurting us, and he explained that this was what they used to make the poison blow darts. Pretty cool. He also pointed out some monkeys to us, high up in the trees. We passed around the binoculars (we went off the path to see them closer) and they were Churongos. This was pretty cool, although I swear I’m kind of blind when it comes to finding monkeys. I took a lot of pictures; so many that there are a few that I can’t remember the significance of because the animals/bugs are so small. We found another frog/toad as well as a centi/mili pede; Daniel told us the difference but I can’t remember it now. One of them has legs in sets of 2 and the other in sets of 4. He showed us an ant nest in a tree, and we went to a saltlick overlook. It took me a while to figure out that these are specific places in the forest where minerals (and therefore nutrients) are in the ground, therefore all the animals go there to eat them. I didn’t see anything terribly exciting, but there was a pretty cool spider. He also showed us this white, crystallized bug. A virus gets in it, kills it from the inside, then leaves after the bug dies to find a new host. Lovely. We passed this really nice-looking tree that was reddish and smooth, and it’s called a bald Indian. It sheds its bark every year, so that way other plants don’t go and grow on top of it. We saw some more ants, but these were a little more dangerous. They’re called congas, or bullet ants, and they’re pretty much as has the lower knuckle of your pinky, up. They’re called bullet ants because that’s what they feel like if they bite you. Daniel got bitten on the back of the leg once, and he couldn’t walk. The pain makes you want to go unconscious and lasts for 10 or 12 hours. Supposedly the worst place to get them is your finger, and some people throw up after getting bitten because it hurts that bad. I stayed away. On a brighter side, I saw these super cool-looking purple leaves and asked Jose about them; supposedly they’re a good indicator that the forest is virgin/undisturbed. Plus I found a snail in one of them. We headed back, and it felt so good to change into teva sandals, a tank top, and my bandana. My bandana was pretty much my best friend during the entire trip. It kept my hair out of the way, I didn’t have to worry what it looked like, kept my scalp from burning and it kept anything weird from crawling into my hair. Needless to say, I wore a bun pretty much all week, except when I used a braid to go swimming… I was also more or less the go-to person when anyone wanted their hair braided, which made me feel pretty important. We ate lunch at noon (chicken and rice, I believe, plus we always had the obligatory potato soup) and afterwards a bunch of us went to the hammocks to talk and play bullshit; cards (or nipes, as they are called here) turned out to be a type of lifesaver. At 3 we had to be back at the dining hall to go out on the boat. We meant to go piranha fishing, but we got distracted along the way and saw about three anacondas, if I remember correctly, which was pretty cool. The guides are absolutely amazing at that type of thing; I kind of think they have some sort of animal detector in their brain because if you don’t know they’re there, they’re pretty much impossible to see. I guess seeing anacondas like that is kind of rare, because the guides all got super excited and even took out their cameras (When the guides, who see things like this every day, take out their cameras… you know it’s a big deal!) There was also a sloth waaay up in one of the trees, and it was still there when we went back to the station a few hours later. The thing is, River Tiputini is called “white waters” which is totally a joke because it definitely looks more like café con leche or something. There are, however, little streams and stuff that are called “black waters”… I think it has something to do with the sediment. It was really bizarre because there was practically a line where the waters changed colors. We went fairly deep into the stream, then the guides started to pull out some hooks, line, and raw meat. PIRANHA FISHING. I didn’t catch anything, but the guards caught a ton and so did some of the kids, including Germán. The BEST part, however, was Felicia. She is easily the smallest (and most energetic, and funniest, and most gullible AND most loveable) person on the trip, and she caught a TURTLE. No joke. I have no idea how she did it (except maybe with some help from the guide) or why a turtle would want to eat meat (unless it was hungry…) But that was pretty darn awesome. I could’ve easily continued my fruitless attempts at piranha fishing, but we had to head back. Piranhas are edible, by the way, although we didn’t keep any for that specific purpose. On our way back we saw a caiman, which are pretty much mini alligator/crocodile things. I sat next to Felicia during dinner and she told me that we were going to go look for Germans in the river afterwards. “Germans/alemanes” and caimanes do sound similar in Spanish, but not THAT similar. I love Felicia. We are lasagna for dinner (I was so happy. I miss pasta.) and fruit for dessert, then we all got back out on the boat again to find caimans (although Mr. Reese found a toad on the way out. It looked kind of orange). We used this huge strobe light that eventually went out, so they used someone’s headlamp. No, none of us were cool enough to actually wear them on our head; we used them more or less as flashlights. We found one on the bank, which was cool. I’m not sure how the guides found the next one, but it was by the bank in the water. One of the guides then got IN the water and grabbed the caiman; Brenden got to pet it. Muy chévere. We only saw the two, and then we went to bed. This night it rained, and it did keep me up for a little bit, but I wasn’t going to complain. Eight and a half hours in a bed is nothing to complain about.
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