Time Out: Part 2

After traveling to Loja and Machala during the first week of my vacation, I returned to Ambato to see a dentist about my impacted wisdom tooth that was giving me trouble. The dentist I saw freaked me out a little when he told me that he needed to remove the permanent retainer on my bottom teeth because it was causing interference between the energy fields of the left and right hemispheres of my brain (science!), but I convinced him that all I really needed was to have my tooth removed, so he scheduled me in for an appointment with an oral surgeon. Since the appointment wasn't for another week and I didn't want to spend any more of my vacation time in Ambato, I packed a bottle of Ibuprofen and headed out to the jungle town of Tena with my go-to travel partner, Caitlin.

Tena

Caitlin and I had originally planned to go deep into the jungle so we could fight jaguars and learn more about the relatively isolated indigenous peoples that live in the Amazon. As we did more research the day before leaving (which is what always happens when you put the two most procrastinative and indecisive people I know in charge of planning a trip), we discovered that going deep into the jungle is actually surprisingly expensive and time consuming. I also learned that my chances of finding a jaguar in the wild were slim, and if I really wanted to see one I would probably have to settle for seeing it in captivity.

As our first stop in the jungle, we agreed on going rafting in Tena because our friend Justin lives there and he pretty much did all the setup work for us, meaning we wouldn't have to really plan anything ourselves except for getting on a bus over there (which we still ended up kind of botching by missing the first bus to Tena).

Bridge and boardwalk in Tena

Tena is a five hour bus ride from Ambato, which seemed like a joke after our nine hour trip from Machala to Ambato. Tena is a small city with a surprising amount of foreigners, who I think mostly come to Tena to take advantage of the great rafting available on its many rivers. I was concerned that the weather in Tena would be unbearably hot and humid like the coast of the country, but it turned out to be very bearable and not nearly as hot as Guayaquil or Machala.

I had the chance to hang out with some Peace Corps volunteers placed in Tena and we got to talking about the physical features of the locals. I commented that Ecuadorians with a lot of indigenous blood sometimes look Asian, and Asian looking Ecuadorians are sometimes given the nickname chino, which is what all Asian people in Ecaudor are called regardless of what their ethnic background is. These features are sometimes observed on indigenous people in the Sierra, but they are definitely more pronounced on the people in the rainforest. One of the Peace Corps guys explained to me that there is actually linguistic evidence to suggest that indigenous Ecuadorian groups came from Asia and that they probably do share ancestors with Oriental cultures, which is pretty trippy to think about.


Rafting

One of the awesome things about Ecuador is how laid back most organizations are compared to how anal and overcautious we can sometimes be in the U.S. For example, when we signed up for rafting in Tena, all we did was sign a form and get a five minute talk on the way to the river about what to do if you fall out of the raft. I remember going rafting once in the United States and we had to sit down in a group and actually attend a class about all the different safety procedures.

The laid back attitude extended into the actual rafting part, and our guides were doing ridiculous things like trying to stand up on the raft while going through rapids, getting out of the raft to climb and jump off of big rocks, and purposefully making the raft capsize just to scare us. Rafting ended up being a lot more fun because our tour guides were out of control, but the most memorable part of the trip for me were the awesome stories they were telling us about their rafting adventures.

My favorite story they told me was about Bear Grylls, the host of the television show Man vs. Wild. I was always a big fan of that show until that scandal broke about the footage being cut together in a clever way to mislead the audience about what really happened. Apparently he also sometimes sleeps in hotels at night and his camera crew helps him build things.

Our tour guides helped Bear get to his locations in the rainforest, and they told us about all the things they did to make his trip appear more adventurous than it really was. For instance, in one scene he supposedly comes across a pond with piranhas where he spears them for food. The truth is that piranhas don't live in the part of the rainforest where he was, so the guys in the tour company caught a bunch of them at a different location and put them in a pond for Bear to hunt. In another scene, Bear is seemingly riding on a log and steering it down the river, when in reality they were towing the log down the river in a raft right behind the camera. Regardless of how much outside help he receives, he still does do some ridiculous things that make the show entertaining ("He just drank a bottle of his own pee, are you serious!?"), so I'll probably continue to watch reruns when they come on Discovery Channel and act like I don't know what's really going on.

Zoo

I was pretty devastated when I learned that it is nearly impossible to see big animals in their natural habitat in the jungle, but I figured that a zoo was still better than nothing so we headed to an animal reserve just outside of Tena called El Arca.

The zoo had some pretty cool animals, although I'm not sure that all of them are native to Ecuador, let alone the rainforest. Among the animals we saw were an ostrich, lions, crocodiles, turtles, parrots, and spider monkeys. I also learned that the Spanish word for "sloth" is perezoso (translation: lazy), which made me happy.

Comin' at ya!

The best animal we saw all day was a little monkey that was just jumping around following the visitors. Somehow, feeding the animals was not prohibited in that zoo so people were giving the monkey potato chips. At one point the monkey snatched a little girl's lollipop and ran away with it. I'm very surprised that feeding the animals isn't prohibited because I'm sure lollipops and potato chips can't be good for monkeys, but I do admit that it was really funny to see the monkey licking the lollipop and later trying to open it by banging it against a rock.

This happened minutes after the guide assured me that the monkeys in the zoo never steal things from people

Feeding the animals was just one surprising behavior from the Ecuadorian visitors in the zoo. People were reaching into cages and touching animals, even waking up a poor sleeping anteater. At one point a guy grabbed a fruit from a tree and gave it to his kid to eat. The whole time the guide didn't ever scold anyone for being disrespectful and disrupting the animals.

The mindset of the Ecuadorian visitors seemed to be "We paid to enter the zoo, so we'll do whatever we want." This is in contrast to the mindset in our zoos in the States, where visitors are expected to not bother the animals and respect the zoo's facilities and the work of the caretakers.

Tubing

A fun advantage of having friends who live in the places I visit is that they know what the locals do and what kinds of activities are typical in the area. This is an experience that is frequently lost when visitors just do touristy activities, because no one really spends time at the tourist spots in his own neighborhood (go to NYC and see how many people you can find that have ever been to the Statue of Liberty besides on a grammar school field trip). Tena is well known for its rafting and that is what most tourists spend their time doing, but the truth is that very few people in Tena actually go rafting for fun. One of Justin's friends suggested that we participate in an activity more popular with the locals: tubing.

Tubing in Tena is grabbing an inner tube, buying a bottle of veintecinco, and floating down the river that runs through the city. Veintecinco is a type of Ecuadorian alcohol that our Peace Corps friend describes as "Ecuadorian moonshine." The explicably named (it costs twenty-five cents a cup) and inexplicably pronounced (they pronounce it veinteshinco) alcohol tasted terrible, but I wasn't about to miss the chance to have an authentic Tena experience.

Since it rained the entire night before, the water level in the river was high and it was moving unusually quickly. Unfortunately, the river wasn't high enough to let us float above all of the rocks on the river floor. Every few minutes someone in the group would jump out of their tube and scream after being violated by a pointy rock hiding just beneath the water level.

I left the river more beat up than anyone else because I was the only genius who didn't wear shoes. It turns out to be pretty hard to stand up on sharp rocks in a fast moving river, so I had to be given a piggy back ride by my buddy John when he felt sorry for me after watching me progress only two feet after five minutes of trying to walk to the shore. Tubing was still really fun, and I'll have to find a good river and a bodega that sells veintecinco in NYC to start a tubing craze back home.

With Justin and Caitlin at one of Tena's two bars after a hard day of tubing

My vacation was awesome, and I'm glad that I saw most of the remaining parts of Ecuador I wanted to visit and had the chance to hang out with some WorldTeach friends in their natural environments along the way. Now it's back to teaching for my third and final semester at SECAP. It has been nerve racking this entire year not knowing if I will be accepted by a medical school this cycle and pondering what I would do if I am not, but with my time in Ecuador quickly running out, I am determined to enjoy the job and home I have here in Ecuador in spite of my uncertain future, and to keep writing it down so that in a few years when I have a real job in the States with copious amounts of stress, I can think about what an idiot I was for leaving my relaxed Ecuadorian lifestyle.