Many things have happened in these last ten days since we have been off the grid. In some ways, there has been too much to be able to fit in a blog post so I will try to keep it short. After spending a little over a week in the beautiful mountain enveloped city of Baños, we went to another location with our Spanish school in the jungle near Tena; a town in central Ecuador. After a 3 hour bus ride, and a 45 minute drive into the depths of the jungle, we found ourselves at a farm (I believe subsistence farm) on the bank of roaring river. The family who runs the Spanish program came with us along with some of the teachers from the banana farm as well. We had Spanish lessons in the late afternoon, free time right after lunch, and various activities in the morning. Free time was usually spent reading or napping in hammocks, which in my opinion was a great alternative to many of the things we choose to fill our free time with in America. The break from constant stimulus and media input has been very grounding and healthy for all of us. We stayed in a cozy 2 story wooden shack with tin roofs. Most nights it would rain heavily which made sleeping under a tin roof a bit like sleeping in a big drum, but somehow still fairly peaceful.
For two of the days in the jungle, we hiked up these beautiful waterfalls in the Amazon, and many said it was their favorite thing they had done so far. As well as being in cool water on hot day, the gorgeous plants, rocks, and occasionally very colorful spiders were an excellent break from all the learning in Spanish classes. Another day we went to a waterfall with a pool and a rope swing, also accompanied by some cliff jumping (under ten foot jumps though, just like Carpe Diem´s insurance told us).
But we haven’t been all vacation on this trip. I think I speak for all of us when I say Spanish classes were a little challenging at times, and we have all improved a great deal. As well as our language improvements we have grown in other ways. Many of us have said that we now feel like traveling ourselves would be very easy for us. This week was our first student directed travel week, so without too much assistance from the leaders we managed to stick fairly closely to a pretty tight budget, and booked all the transportation and housing for our time in Otavalo. Otavalo is bigger than Baños so we don’t get bored as quickly but not so big that we ever get lost, (except all the others guys say I have a terrible sense of direction).
Now that we are in Otavalo, a much more tourist laden urban area, we like the food much better. On the farm it was a bit different. Many of our meals consisted of seventy percent white rice, a little bit of yucca, and vegetable soups. Sometimes we would get meat or eggs with our meals but we had to stock up on canned tuna, much of which was consumed in the first 2 days.
Amongst all the fun and games though, there was a significant negative for the group during our time on the farm. It is sad to say that a member of our group, Nico, has left to travel on his own. It was highly unexpected and I’m not going to try and explain all of the reasons he left just because I don’t want to communicate anything that I could have misinterpreted. He felt the program was not the right thing for him, and that it was nothing against the group or the leaders. A lot of us feel like this was not a bad decision on his part and we respect his decision, but we wish he were still here to share our experiences with. But despite this fact, we are all having great times together and we wish everyone well back home.