Back in Quito now for more Spanish lessons, but spent the weekend in the jungle, and absolutely loved it!

Friday, the French couchsurfer and I took a six hour bus ride to a town called Tena; now most of the roads were gravel, with a few bits of recently concreted or tarmacked road interspersed every so often. But I think I have a newfound appreciation for any roads better than the road to our Yosemite campsite, and this certainly was.

I was very grateful for this French guy coming with me - he speaks pretty fluent Spanish, as well as English and obviously French - as it's scary not being able to speak the language very well in a country where people's English is very limited. So in Tena, he was a great help when we met a friend of the German CS hosts, a Quecha guy who runs "family tours" - publicized only by word of mouth it seems. Dinner was at some relatively fancy and not very local restaurant, unfortunately - I think he assumed we wanted to go to a touristy place and this one obviously was: it was the first place I've come across menus in English.

We spent the night in his gorgeous yet simple wood-slat house, where chickens and dogs, as well as kids, were free to roam. Early in the morning, just as I was waking up, a chicken flew in through the window above my head, squawking. Nice wake-up call!

The French guy, a photographer, had other plans for the weekend, so I was left to fend for myself with my poor Spanish skills, a bit of a daunting prospect but I braced myself and jumped on the back of the pick-up with our host's brother - my "tour guide" for the weekend - his wife, and a bunch of kids. Their father's vinca is about 45 minute's drive by pick-up truck taxi, on the outskirts of the jungle. And it was even more gorgeous than the house we stayed in in town. Very basic, very simple, with an open cooking fire inside and a big gap between the wall and roof at one end to let the smoke out. No electricity or running water inside? You can see why I loved it. You could say they're living in conditions of poverty, but the kids were always well fed; in fact, it seemed like they were eating almost continuously! And most of the food comes from outside; they're nearly self-sufficient it seems: papayas, some strange fatty purple fruit, fish they caught in the river, giant huhu-grub-like things they roast, snails from the streams, tea - great for your health, I'm told - made by boiling leaves of some tree or other!

The plan was for a walk into the jungle after brekkie. Must have looked a little crazy following this guy with a machete into the unknown, but it was fine, and he turned out to be super knowledgeable about different plants and their uses. I discovered coffee in its unrecognizably different green berry-shaped form; some bark which is good for your health; lemon-flavoured ants which live inside a certain tree's branches; sugar cane which is great to chew but probably not so great for the old teeth; cocoa beans in their pod - which have this great-tasting slimy stuff around them but taste terrible if you bite into the bean - don't worry though, my appreciation for the beans was renewed when we made chocolate - from scratch - later on.

But, before we got to that, they taught me how to make bracelets using seeds as beads, and some sort of natural string. Then it was time to make chocolate. Now, for those of you who don't know her, my big little sis is currently travelling the world, on some sort of quest to discover the world's best chocolate it seems. Well Rachy, I think you're gonna have to make a stop in Ecuador, cos I don't think Ghanain OR Belgian chocolate comes close to chocolate you've made from the start. They'd been drying the beans for a week or so; now it was time to roast them over the fire. In the morning, once they'd cooled, they ground them, cooked the ground beans, and ground them some more. I remember a friend once sent me 70% cocoa chocolate from Switzerland; well, this was 100% cocoa chocolate!

After a hot chocolate and some not-so-hot chocolate, my guide, Ita and I left to bathe in a river, about an hour and a half's walk away. Let me introduce Ita. Her name is Quecha for "dense, inpenetrable jungle" but she wasn't nearly as rough as her name makes her sound. She was super attentive and friendly, even defending me from her brothers. If it wasn't for her befriending me, I think I would have felt very alone, because it was so difficult to talk with the adults with my limited Spanish and I obviously can't speak Quecha, the language of one of the indigenous people groups here. She would often express her enjoyment of something simple like a swing by laughing incessantly - and that's a language I can understand!; she was the happiest kid ever. And she was only four years old.

I could say so much more about what an amazing weekend it was, but this is already getting way too long.Plus, I really need to shower... haven't done that in a while!

(And I forgot to even talk about the drink us women had the task of making by chewing up and spitting out some root vegie, then leaving it to ferment... ¨Unfortunately¨ I didn´t stay long enough to try it!)