This weekend's trip was full of surprises! It started Thursday night when we took the night bus to Tena, a 5 hour bus ride, to a town on the edge of the jungle. We arrived around 11 pm just in time for an amazing thunder shower and rain storm. The hostel we stayed at was full of wild life, at least on the stairs up to the rooms. We saw a huge dead cockroach, and leaf shaped bugs, I cant remember what they were called but there were interesting looking creatures that is for sure! We even named one of them Sally…she looked pregnant! It was actually a really nice place, had hammocks hanging over looking the city and clean bathrooms. Its fun to watch TV on these trips because the hostels all seem to have cable, so we watch TNT and USA which always have movies on them that are in English, but have Spanish sub titles on the bottom and the translations to Spanish are nothing like what is really being said. It makes us all laugh just to see how far off they are. We watched part of Nacho Libre that night. The next morning we woke up and had breakfast and went to the travel company we hired for the weekend. We spent Friday hiking up this trail with a shaman guide and his nephew. We drove 45 minutes through an area of homes with no windows but had electricity and partially paved roads. They were replacing all of the bridges on the road we drove on and all the worker men were just sitting or standing around watching a few guys were. It makes me wonder just how long they have been working on the roads. The truck we road in was a new Toyota that sat 6 people inside and we had 7ish people in the back, as we drove down these roads at 110Km an hour! I was sitting in the back…holding on for life! Along with most of the other girls lol. We got to the hiking area called Pimpilala Waterfall. We stopped at the home of a family and had our faces painted with a fruit that was believed to keep away bugs and bad sprits for the long hike we were about to endure. The paint came from part of native tree which grows in the area. We also had a ritual preformed that was suppose to get rid of all the bad energy from our bodies. It consisted of large leaves of a particular plant (can't remember the name) being rubbed on us and blown away from our bodies. We then began the hike to the waterfall. We hiked along the side and through the water flow. We hiked up a side wall and went through the waterfall and down the other side and began our up ward hike again. We hiked most of the day in our bikinis and these huge rubber boats! Never thought I would have hiked the Amazon in my bikini. We continued up the forest climbing through multiple different waterfalls, climbing into large pools of water pulling ourselves up with a rope the guide carried which he tied around trees at the top. It was a major hike that if was done in the states you would have to sign many release forms and still don't know if it would be able to be done. It was a difficult trek to the very top and then we hiked out of the forest on a trail through the woods. It was up and down through a trail of mud and tree rubbish. Once we exited the forest we hiked along a road for a few miles. When we asked the guide how much longer we had he said on just an hour or so. NOPE it was like 3 more, in all we hiked for 7 hours with only water. We then had lunch in a small hut on the side of the road. We had fresh caught Tillapilla fish, rice, ensalada of onions and tomato and coke. It was an interesting lunch….fish…yea it didn't settle well…I took like 3 bites and called it good. After lunch we walked a short distance to a swimming hole. We jumped off rocks and slid down the natural slide into the water. After we finished there a taxi came and picked up the group and took us back to Tena so that we could shower and get ready for our long ride to Limoncocha. We showered in a hostel across the street from the tour company and hung out for a few hours until we went to dinner at a café on the main drag of the town that had good fried chicken. It was across the street from a panadria that was too tempting to pass up. So we all went and got bread from there to take on the bus with us. Little did we realize that the plastic bags that the bread was put into released fumes into the bread. For the first time ever I could taste the carcinogens in the bread. It was bad! Horrible! I ate the middle out of the bread because it tasted normal there. But what can you expect when you buy 4 mini loafs of bread and water for 70 cents. We hoped on the bus around 11pm and got to Limoncocha at 8am. We walked down the humid wooded area to a lagoon where we caught a motorized a canoe too the home of our shaman guides brother and his family. The water was very stagnant, and Julie, Chelsea and I kidded about needing to water-ski and wakeboard in the infested waters if we could on do a dry start and finish. So that we wouldn't be eaten alive by crocs or Piranhas! We stayed in a house that had 10 rooms and 2 beds in each room with bug nets covering each bed. There were windows with no glass and the roof was 3 feet above where the wall ended. The bathroom had 2 toilets that just had dark plastic tarps around really toilets that you had to dump a bucket of water into to flush. There was also a shower that was fueled by rain water. After settling in our rooms we had a breakfast of fresh eggs, bread and Tang. We then began our next hike through the forest. We saw many different plants and bugs. Many spiders, deadly ants, other types of bugs and lots of neat looking plants. We hiked to the biggest tree I have ever seen. It was probably the size of a semi truck across the base of the tree. The weather was very hot and humid and we had been hiking for about 4 and a half hours when we asked our guides how much longer and they said only an hour, well in fact once again it was more than that. We all started taking bets on what time we would get back and how much longer "we really had!" haha. In all that day we hiked for about 6 hours. We told them that we really wanted to get to fish for Piranhas so we rushed back for lunch and fishing. We split into two small canoes one of 4 people that I was in and the other had 7. We caught 10 fish in our boat in the NapoRiver (it was really a big lagoon). I caught 2 fish!!!! WOOOHOOO!!! I think I have good luck when it comes to catching fish J only 2 of us out of 9 caught 2 fish! One person caught 1, and everyone else didn't catch any. It was a lot of fun except for the part where we got eaten alive by the beetle bugs and mosquitoes! Once we had used all the old meat for bait we headed back t o the house and showered and got ready for dinner. But little did we know that the guides had something else in mind before we could eat. We got back into the motorized canoe and went looking for Crocodiles. And boy did we find some. It was currently mating season so they were extra aggressive…It was a rather scary experience. I was sitting on the side closest to them and they would just stair into your eyes and then raise their tale, meaning that they were getting pissed off. The croc then charged towards the boat and ended up just getting the motor on the back of the boat. After the second time it happened a few of the girls got extremely hysterical and so we stopped taunting the Crocs and just looked at the fire flies and the other night creatures that were making the Jungle sound just like every movie and CD portrays it as! We returned back to the house, but with much trouble, the second croc got the motor better than we had thought and so we weren't moving very well, in the end they had to get the ores out and paddle us back into the dock. Dinner consisted of romen noodles and ensalada. Some girls had the piranhas but I opted out… We had wine and tang juice for dinner and a cup of this liquor that the tribe makes that smells really strong but didn't taste too bad. It was a hot tea of fermented onions and something else. We sat around a camp fire that was really not needed because it was still 75 degrees out and not going to cool down any. Yuri, our shaman guide told us stories about his community and wanted us to share as well, but we were all so tired from the days travels and lack of sleep on the night bus that we didn't have much to say, so we all just went to bed. The next morning we got up at 6 and went monkey hunting but were unsuccessful. Had breakfast, learned more about their culture and then prepared to leave. However, when we went piranha fishing the day before our canoe was lucky enough to get to see some monkeys in the trees and therefore at least we can say we saw some monkeys! The other canoe wasn't as successful…they didn't get to see any. We road the motorized canoe back to the drop off point and caught a packed bus to a small jungle town of Coca where we would catch the main bus back to Quito. We arrived in Coca at 12:30pm and had to wait to catch the bus at 3:45. We ate at this hole in the wall next door to the bus terminal. We all thought that we were going to get sick from it but there were no issues. We wasted time until the bus got there by visiting shops close by and watching the Ecuador, Chile Futbal game. Ecuador ended up winning!! Chile got a red card in the beginning of the game, and I think that helped Ecuador. We got on the bus around 4 and had to try and get people out of our seats, but one man refused to move and the bus drive couldn't get him out so I stood for the first 2ish hours of the trip, which was fine since my butt was sore from sitting the canoe the day before. Julie and I stood in the front by Monica until the man finally got of in a town called Scumbio where we picked up more people who somehow had the same seats we were assigned. It was a huge problem for all the stops we met, but there were other empty seats so everything eventually got figured out, and we were all able to sit together! We tried to watch the futbal game on the every TV we passed, because EVERYONE in Ecuador was watching the game. At around 6 the bus got stopped and we had to exit to go through a passport check point. The military men just asked us a few questions and we were on our way again. There were a few soldiers just standing around, that were trying to guess Julie and my age, we laughed and told them they were way off. They hadn't realized that we understood everything they were saying. We later got stopped at another check point and had to get off the bus again. It was a very long night that just wouldn't end. Our bus ride was supposed to be only 7 hours; it turned out to be almost 12. We got home at 2:30 in the morning. It was a weekend full of new experiences and didn't contain any major problems so I really can't complain. I learned a lot and experienced things that I still can't believe I got to, with the Indigenous tribe and Crocs and really just being in the Amazon Rainforest. It was Incredible!!!Pictures to come soon!Lots of Love,Brittany!