Rafting in the Jungle!

I had a fantastic weekend... I headed off to Tena, a small city (16,000) in the Oriente (aka jungle!) with four friends: Ali, Kalysta, Liz and Rachel, for a weekend of fun. We planned to meet at Ali's (on my block) at 6:45, but people were late, we were slow calling a cab, I forgot a copy of my passport, Ali forgot her iPod, so we didn't actually leave our street until almost 7:30 and were well prepared to miss out bus, driving through normal (terrible) Quito traffic. But we had the most amazing cab driver, who called the bus company, asked them to pick us up on the entrance to the autopista, waited with us there, then called again and drove us somewhere else... with all the time he spent he could have easily made a few more fares, but instead he helped us out. It made me have a little bit of faith in Quito again.

The bus ride was good but VERY bumpy- the roads are not so well-paved in the Jungle! We got to our hostel a little after 1, went to travel company to book our rafting trip, ate, went to the market and hung out the rest of the day.

Rafting Saturday was AMAZING. I had never been rafting before, and was more than a little scared of the Class-IV rapids I was about to encounter, but the entire thing was fantastic (well, maybe not the almost-hour walk to the river, at times through mud up to my knees- I didn't care about getting dirty, but I had to take off my sandals, and my feet hurt from all the rocks). Our guide was really nice and we did lots of fun things on the raft- after going down a jump, we would paddle back into it and get sprayed; we all sat in the back and he used his rope to pull the raft to a 90 degree angle, all five rafts docked at this huge rock we all jumped off of... we floated down the river... we would ride on the FRONT of the raft into the rapids... Basically I never wanted it to end, but of course it had to, and the next day we were all quite sore and bug-bitten (crazy huge bug bites that hurt just to touch), and we had to head back to Quito. That rafting was definitely one of the highlights of my semester. If you are ever here: TENA, RIVER PEOPLE, CLASS IV FULL DAY RAPIDS.

Too bad this week is going to blow. It's midnight- I'm sure I have lit reading for tomorrow, I have my final political science paper due Wednesday at 1PM (just some corrections, but I need to do them), a political science 2-page paper due Wednesday at 8PM which I started (this is not too bad), a huge Anthro test Thursday at 1PM which I need to continue studying for, and a lot of Anthro homeworks to do... Blah. And Friday starts our Model UN simulation, which I will go into supremely stressed out. Lovely. Plus my sorority elections are Sunday, which I know I will be thinking about.

I am going back to the Jungle in 11 days, much deeper, on Beloit's dime... 11 days... think rivers a and rafting and clean air...