In the jungle the rainy jungle, Ceri sleeps tonite

  La Hesperia, Ecuador
Saturday, May 26, 2007

Well I made it...

A three hour scary bus journey complete with 45 minute live infomercial for Ginseng and the delights of "White chicks" on the video (mercifully in Spanish so I couldn't really understand it, which must have made it better, luckily also I had to get off half way through it). I was dropped on the side of the road (kilometre 58 to be precise if anyones interested) with some vagueish instructions about heading towards a stone arch and walking up a track. Luckily there was a nice young lad named Carlos there complete with mule to transport my rucksack up the track (never would have made it otherwise, very hot, very wet, very high - not the fun type).
Unfortunately arriving Friday afternoon was not ideal as almost everybody had naffed off for the weekend so it was pretty much me and a hammock for the weekend but that was kinda cool, except the scary bit of trying to find the toilet in the dark when surrounded by all the sounds of the forest.

Anyhoos this is what awaited me, my new home for the next 6 months or so:

3. Mi Casa

And in that my new room, complete with Swiss room mate. My first attempt at putting up my mozzie net was not overly succesful due to a complete lack of string, nails etc:

1. Home sweet home

but things soon improved following a bit of scavenging and full use of the leatherman:

2. Home, now mozzie free home

Work is pretty tough here, the first morning I helped clear all the weeds and stuff away from some newly planted trees in the reforestation bit - after about 20 minutes I had lost about 3 litres in sweat and pretty much most of the will to live. Following a hearty lunch the supposedly less strenouos after job consisitng of shifting about a million planks of new wood. I slept well that night - except for again needing the frickin toilet in the middle of the dark, wet scary night.

This is where we relax after a hard days work - the view is pretty cool:

4. This is the living room

And again, pretty cool view from where we have grub:

5. Dining room view

Food which comes out of things like this in fact:

6. Shake them around and you get an omelette

The rest of this week we've planted loads new trees in the reforestaion lines - basically consists of one person heading through the forest with a machete followed by others with hoes and tree planting type stuff tools (techincal name) and then obviously a wee tree taken from the nursery. I did mean to take a photo of the first tree I planted but I got kinda confused which one it was - they all look alike in a forest full of trees which are all pretty similar. Other jobs have been clearing the veg patch, weeding the strawberry and blackberry plants, macheting down everything in the banana plantation (except the banana trees obviously, though I hope I got it the right way round which were which) and planting a field of maize. I'm never gonna complain about the extra cost of organic cornflakes again.

The people here are pretty cool - the people in charge are really enthusistic about it and really motivating and then theres about 10 volunteers in a kinda United Nations smorgasboard (sp?) of nationalities and then the people who work on the farm and do everthing we do excpet twice aswell and about 5 times as fast.

I'm in Quito writing this as theres no intraweb in the place, a group of us are heading up to climb one of the volcanoes near Quito tomorrow, and then biking down so should be kinda cool, or tortourous given that its almost 5000 metres high. Gulp! So assuming I don't fall into the lava or off the bike or something stupid I shall talk to y'all maybe next weekend from Santa Domingo which is the nearest civilization to our place with intraweb.

Gotta go now and carbo load for tomorrow.

Hasta Luego