In the middle of November I traveld to a town named Tena in the Amazon region with some of my friends. We started friday evening and arrived in the same night. It was a journey from 2800m down to 600m and from a temperature of average dry 18 degrees celcius up to about 30 absolutley humid degrees! A bit exhausting, but changes like this make it a weekend of distraction, excitement and new adventures.
The real adventure started saturday morning after a nice breakfast in our cute hostel, with a German guy as its owner. In my daily life in Quito I never really meet European people, but as soon as I start traveling it is kind of funny how many German speaking people you meet. 🙂
We took a bus from Tena to a village called Misahuallí which is located right at a river. We went there to see monkeys. A woman sold us „the monkey’s favorite food“ which would make them jump on us and we could take great pictures. Well, this „food“ was absolutely the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life! They gave us HUGE white maggots in a cup. Luckily another woman came with us and so we didn’t have to touch these „animals“. Right when we were walking down to the beach (on the river) it started raining heavily, but just for one or two minutes. So we went under the roof of a cabin and couldn’t believe our eyes! There were monkeys EVERYWHERE!!! 🙂 My childhood dream of having a monkey jump on you came true, when the woman started to put the maggots really close to us. Suddenly a monkey jumped down the balcony directly on our back, shoulders and sat down on our heads, holding onto our hair. It was soooo funny, because sometimes I wasn’t expecting anything and suddenly a monkey jumped on you. We all had a lot of fun! 🙂
Right afterwards we booked a tour to two tiny „villages“ which were located at the river as well, but you had to get there by boat. So we got on this typical boat for rivers in the Amazon and were going to the first village. The landscape was just beautiful and so different to anything I’ve seen before! We got off at a place where indigenous people welcomed us. These people live there and show/tell tourists (mostly Ecuadoreans) a lot about there culture, history, handicrafts, weapons, instruments and all kinds of plants. We got a guided tour through a garden full of plants which are able to heal different illnesses, I’ve never seen before! It was so interesting listening to the explanations and later going to a natural little pharmacy of their homemade medicine. There where hundreds of little bottles and cremes of all plants, each one for only 2 or 3 dollars!
Right afterwards we also got to go to a little shed where the indigenous people sold the most beautiful and traditional jewelery with perls out of wood, meaningful rocks, sea shells… These weren’t expensive either, so I started shopping! 🙂
Our next stop after we got on the boat again was in another „village“ where we got a little presentation of food preperation, music and dance and other amazing animals you normaly only see in a Zoo! It made me so happy being able to hold these animals for the first time in my life!!! The indigenous people also told us about all kinds of dangerous fish which live in that river. Fish which LOVE to bite you or are poisonous. Well, when we came back it was so hot and we were already sweating all day, so we decided to go swimming like all the other people we saw on the beach. Nothing happend, the water was just really nice and refreshing! 🙂
After the mosquitoes almost ate us up, we went back to Tena and finished this adventurous day with some ice cream. We went back home to Quito on sunday morning.
On every single one of my journeys I’m still so impressed by the beauty and diversity of this country! In which other country in the world do you seriously get the chance to go to the Andes, the jungel, the Amazon, the rainforests and the beach in such a short amount of time???
I LOVE IT!!! VIVA ECUADOR 🙂
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