doing a death round of hemispheric limbo with the conga ants

Well friends,

I have returned alive and in one piece (with maybe a few small chunks missing) from my WILD JUNGLE ADVENTURE! Which turned out to be one of the most relaxing adventures of my life, and full of cousins.

We picked up Matt from the airport on Friday evening and took him back to Cumbayá for a lovely family spaghetti dinner. Grampi and Helen came too, and Grampi was in a very silly mood -- he kept on making weird faces and once pretended to fall off his chair, nearly giving Lori a heart attack! We had a regular laughing yoga session though, which lasted almost until our abuelos had to go home.

On Saturday morning there were crèpes, and then at the last minute we decided to carry one of the kitties to Venecia as a gift for Myriam, so we had to take one last photo with the four cousins and the four kitties, then assemble a double-box system with plenty of padding and load him into the truck taxi with the rest of the stuff. He meowed for the first hour, but then found his way back inside the box and napped in there until we reached Tena. Matt was very concerned that he would remain nameless, but we left it to Myriam who eventually started calling him Bugsy. If it were my cat, I would have called him Pilsener after the box he rode down in. Pil for short?

The Field Station is a rockin' place. On Saturday the students were in and out, but as usual it was full of kids, a whole horde of cousins whose mothers cook and whose fathers work on building projects in the area. They are as wild as they come, but I thoroughly enjoyed having them around all weekend. They play a lot of cards, so we exchanged a few games and dealt many decks over the course of the evenings.

On Sunday morning Matt and I spurred into action a hike into the Coto Cachi reserve. Coto Cachi means "Howler Monkey Lake" in... Kichwa? I didn't catch it. In any case, we saw and touched a cacao tree, an Amazonian skunk cabbage, a red root hardwood, a rare mahogany with seed pods for planting, among others. I caught sight of a red-bellied salamander on the path, but it squirmed out of sight before I could prove it. The best part about the hike was squelching the mud underneath my boots.

In the afternoon we got a group together to go tubing down the river. Everyone was a little bit scared, of anacondas in the water and of the massive whirlpool and of the so-called "penisfish," a very painful parasite that follows a urine stream up to 20 feet, crawls into the urethra and puts out barbs, so that it must be surgically removed. As it was, the rapids were relatively tame and mostly avoidable. The accident-prone member of our group fell behind and disappeared into the whirlpool. A hush fell over the group, and we had almost floated around the corner before his head became visible again. The anaconda did not rear its head. Fortunately. We emerged in Misahualli thrilled and dripping, threw our tubes in the truck and bought ice cream sandwiches to eat while we waited. The first run took longer than we expected, though, so we ended up standing on a street corner across from the famous monkey square, in bathing suits and lifejackets, barefoot, in the rain. A nearby store started blasting reggaeton and of course we had to dance. We had an audience, and were glad when the truck showed up. We piled eighteen people into the bed of the truck on the way home, the tubers plus the Cousins who went everywhere. And a few more in the cab.

The next morning school started up for the students again. Although I, unlike most college students, do not even drink coffee during finals, I had two cups of coffee every day this weekend, just because it was so good! It did help me stay awake through the lecture on psychoactive plants and mental health that Matt and I sat in on. It was interesting, but very long. I picked up a few trains on natural treatments for diagnosed mental illnesses. We'll see if they go anywhere yet...

In the afternoon we went into Tena with Eliza, Sindy and Mela, the trio of teenaged girl-cousins. They took us to a zoo called La Isla, which is, indeed, on an island. You have to walk across the bridge to get there -- and I got the first use out of my brand-new Ecuadorian ID! A $1 discount! La Isla is probably the coolest zoo I have ever visited. It's also the most disorganized. The first thing we saw coming off the bridge was an ostrich, and Eliza told us they call her dad an ostrich because of the way he runs in soccer -- which brings a hilariously undignified view of my uncle to mind. We said hi to the toucan, with his heavily blue-rimmed eyes. I learned that "toucan" is an unfriendly name for girls that come back from the city with too much makeup. And then we saw a huge tapir, just walking around on the paths. He looked like a cross between a pig, an anteater and a hippopotamus, and was probably three or four feet high. Matt thought he was going to charge us, but he was too busy snuffling around for something to eat. On our way to the next cages we almost stepped on a monkey who had burrowed into the roots of a tree. Either he escaped, said Eliza, or he's sick. We also saw these jungle pigs that make the grossest noise I have ever heard, which sounds like a scream in the midst of retching. Mateo said it sounded like the mandrakes in the Harry Potter movie. My favorite things were the jungle cats: a jaguarundi with a long body and long tail, and an ocelot, which is probably the most beautiful animal I have ever seen. Fortunately, those ruthless predators were well-secured.

When we'd had our fill of jungle screeching and tapirs running loose, we went for pizza at a famous Tena pizzeria. It was probably some of the best pizza I've had since coming here, and I had it with tomato juice, which wasn't bad. Not as good as tomate de arbol, but fresh juice is fresh juice. Most of the time. Matt wanted to look at shoes, which was probably a mistake on his part since I can't walk into a shoe store without trying on several pairs of delicious heels. It turned into quite a girly outing, and Sindy and Mela spent a lot of it teasing Mateo about being a girl. He took it rather well, though I think we can partly attribute that to the fact that he wasn't paying much attention to any of us. He got into it when we decided to buy bracelets of a matching style, so I think we can cut him some slack.

On the way back I got to be a pro at riding in the truck bed with the girls. Eliza turned on her Walkman-phone to some heavy beats and we passed around a Red Bull while bouncing over speed bumps and staging a mini dance party in the back of the truck. I think that was my official initiation into the gang, because after that I was the fourth. We bought a ton of junk food at a community store and hung out for the rest of the night.

The evenings were always interesting. Last night we visited a shaman, who drank some iowasca (which I think is a hallucinogen) before performing a healing ritual on two members of the group, as well as a general blessing. It was interesting, but my favorite part of the night was walking back with the girls and our music, choreographing so we wouldn't be afraid of snakes along the side of the road. Back in the dining area someone was showing a Daniel Craig movie, so of course I had to stop and watch before heading off to bed.

The best night was the time we played telephone in Spanish with a bunch of the cousins, who all speak Kichwa. Needless to say it was interesting, especially with Santi's (rude) 12-year-old-boy antics (which had me giggling to death) and the little girls and a few of the students understanding hardly anything.

I left this afternoon, and would have missed the bus except that the bus itself was 15 minutes late. Fortunately...? Es que, in the morning I was waiting for my gang to show up so we could go tubing one more time, so I learned some local pottery techniques from some skilled traditional ceramic workers. As it turned out, the mothers wouldn't let their daughters tube down to Misahualli because of the rumoured anaconda, so we walked along the road up to Coto Cachi and tubed down to Eliza's house. As it turned out, this shorter course was more fun, mostly because I wasn't scared anymore, and because we held onto each other's tubes to go through bigger rapids, and actually flipped out a couple of times. Well worth it.

The bus ride was nice, and I made it back alive, with some sweet banana chips from a roadside vendor and some nice company in the form of a Quiteña woman who moved to the selva with her husband "for health reasons:" to avoid the city pollution, which is considerable. Even I am starting to feel it in my throat. Good thing I learned how to hack in India...

I apparently missed the beginning of a shift, so I'll have to make it up -- but I would not have given up the weekend for the world. I have not felt so relaxed since arriving in Quito, with nothing to do except whatever I want, and lots of kids running around doing whatever they want, laughing and enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived. I feel refreshed and ready to return to the world of expectations, unfulfillable and otherwise, office politics, class, and the world on a watch. I can do it, because That Place exists. In many places. That's just the closest. It's like a Portal into a Magical World...

Novel?

Besitos,
Clarita