I am back in Coca, the same place i wrote from a couple of days ago, as we are returning to base camp from Hector´s Island ("Sumak Allpa" - google it!), which has been really cool.
Hector is a 40-something Ecuadorian who made money by various ways and means, but has spent a lot of his life living in the jungle with tribes, tour guiding, and doing goodness knows what else - he was full of fascinating stories but i imagine we only scratched the surface! He bought an island in the middle of the Napo river (tributary of the Amazon) which is hugely wide (about a kilometre(?) where his island is), and his island is 150 hectares. he bought it to have as a monkey sanctuary, although he has made it clear that it´s not a sanctuary as sanctuaries generally put the animals in cages and rehabilitate them and they are still mostly tame, but the only `cage´ his monkeys have is the island itself, and they can (and do) swim to other islands or the riverbanks if they want to. Monkeys are at risk of deforestation, killing for bush meat, or being caught for the pet trade. he gets hold of them and brings them to his island and sets them free, and there are currently six species of monkey there, along with whatever other wildlife happens to be there - birds, snakes, frogs, and a million billion sand flies, which land on you all the time and bite you, and you look like you have chicken pox. i had over 100 bites on one forearm - crazy shit!
monkeys we saw while we were there include, tamarins, saki monkeys, capuchins, and marmosets (i think). it´s really cool, as we haven´t seen any monkeys yet in Ecuador, even though they are all around us, i´m sure. they are beautiful and it´s great that they can live a natural life without the risk of being killed (well, except by boa constrictors or birds of prey). We went on a walk round the island which was blissfully flat after weeks of hiking up and down and up and down all the time! Hector was full of interesting stories about how the native people make clothes out of this tree, and they eat the sap of that one to cure stomach problems, and they eat this one for its hallucinogenic effects or when they want to get an answer to a question they can´t decide in normal life. he lives on the island with his wife, kids, and a teacher, plus 2 GVI volunteers who follow the monkeys, and he also educates about 20 other local children who can´t get to school elsewhere because they are so remote.
our purpose there was partly for our own enjoyment, and partly to ´do a minger´ as they say. god knows why it´s called that, but it always makes me laugh. i told Galo, one of the Ecuadorian lads, that in England a minger is a slang term for an ugly person which he thought was funny and every time someone mentioned mingers we had a laugh about it. so on Hector´s island, we were there to plant some mahogany trees which can be harvested in 50 years time or so. it´s a shame to plant trees in the rainforest so they can be chopped down, but doing what´s best for the community isn´t always the same as doing what´s best for the environment. most families are really poor and have their own farms to run, and that´s why they are chopping down their own bit of rainforest, so organised money from anywhere will actually help preserve the forest in the long run, as opposed to selling it to oil companies who fell the trees and dig for oil, which they are doing all over, and for a poor family with 8 kids to be offered good money for their farm by an oil company, it´s no wonder they accept. but hopefully education and money can all work together to preserve the communities and the rainforest.
there was a massive storm the night before last, and everyone was sleeping in tents and hammocks, and every single person except me and Sasha, who were in a tent together, plus the 3 members of GVI staff who were in hammocks, got drenched. people moved to under any of the buildings - the classroom, the port, the dining room - so that we looked like a bunch of refugees sleeping in a makeshift shelter. also during the night, Hector´s water tower collapsed, and in the morning, we had an impromptu minger, and we all worked together to dismantle the remains of the tower, removing the nails, and all the pieces of wood, and some people pulled out nails, others carried wood, others sorted it into what was salvageable and what wasn´t, some used stones to hit the nails out (we only had 2 hammers and a crowbar between 25 of us) and others used the tools to prize the wood apart. i got absolutely filthy and looked like an Ecuadorian street urchin, all muddy and grubby on my shorts, sleeves and belly of my tshirt. it was like when there´s a natural disaster in a third word country and everyone pitches in to find survivors, with not a great deal of organisaiton, but things get done and everyone has a part to play. indeed, we found one survivor in the carnage - a 50cm tree snake, god knows how it had survived! it took us all about 3 hours, but we got it done and it was good to feel like we´d helped him out. i guess he and our GVI volunteers will have to rebuild it at some point.
he´s not without water though, being on an island, and it´s lovely to swim near to the island. however, we didn´t have showers, and it{s weird washing in the river (which is fast flowing so that if you don´t hold on, you´ll get swept away. if you´re a good swimmer, you can swim faster than the current, but it´s hard work.) so river washes aren´t really my thing, and you don´t feel clean when you get out, trudge through the mud, and within minutes are dirty and covered in sand flies again. maybe the freezing showers at base camp aren´t so bad after all!
all in all it was a great weekend, even if there was a slight natural disaster, but the place is so serene and beautiful i could happily live my life there, i think. but it is nice to get back to civilisation with its icecreams, chocolate and cybercafes.... and poorly treated animals and the smell of sewage and rotting food.
we are near the end of the first five week phase now, and i´ll be online again soon, as we are going to Baños via Tena - where we will hopefully go mountain biking, and go in the natural baños which give the place its name, while the five-weekers go back to Quito and then home. Then the next people to go home after that will include me!!! Eeek!!
So only six weeks left here for me, and it feels like i´m near the end. I´m not really missing much about England, and I have to say I´m not loking forward to going back there. But here is a list of things I am missing to a greater or lesser extent, then this might make me change my mind a bit:
- Family and friends (obviusly)
- Barney
- Not being sweaty
- Warm showers
- Cadbury´s chocolate
- Fruit other than bananas - the Ecuadorians eat about 5 to 10 bananas a day, and i probably eat 2 or 3 a day. they´re ok but i miss plums, nectarines, strawberries, grapes, and even the humble apple (we do have these occasionally though)
OK, that´s all i can think of for the moment. Hopefully when the time comes i will be happy to go back to England. Feel free to suggest some other things I might be missing. :D
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Pitfalls, point counts and crazy terrain
Well i've been in Ecuador for 3 weeks now, and like CR, it feels like aaaaages! So much has happened i don't quite know where to begin with it all!
The Ecuador project is along similar lines to CR, there are 18 volunteers and we live in a camp in the middle of nowhere. We are in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, and the landscape is really hilly and with loads of little streams here, there and everywhere. When it rains it gets really muddy, and we spend our lives in trousers and wellies, skidding down hillsides on our bums! the camp consists of wooden buildings on stilts, there's the kitchen and comedor (dining room) which is where we spend most of our time when on camp, then there are the volunteer dorms - there are 5 guys and 13 girls, and i am in a dorm with 4 other girls, but all the dorms are in the same hut, so you can hear everything right down to farts and snoring from the other dorms! There is another building where the staff live, and there is a small library (room with a table and a few dozen books) plus another hut for the Ecuadorians who stay on the reserve with us. Of course, there are also showers (freezing cold ones!) and toilets, which are over 100 paces away from my bedroom, and 35 of those paces are actual steps. like i said, it's so hilly here that we are permanently going up and down steps and hills... my leg muscles are like Arnold Schwarzenegger's now!
The other volunteers are mostly from England (Ella, Hayley, Laura, Sherry, Nicky, Hells, Sasha, Jane, Jamie, and Phil are all English) then there's Rikard from Sweden, Bells and Mark from Ireland, Kristen and Catherine from America, and Tim from Australia. We are a mixture of people here for 6 months, 10 weeks, and 5 weeks. Plus there are the staff: Andy, Olly, and Caroline from England, Jaz from Australia, Jenn from Canada, and Mel from America. Added to that are 4 Ecuadroians who are staying on the camp at the moment (new students come every month) and they are Isaac (the teacher) plus David, Cristian and Galo - they are students at the technical college we are partnered with and they come onto our camp to help them learn English.
I tend to hang around mostly with Ella, Hayley and Laura, or the Ecuadorian lads, as my Spanish is coming on in leaps and bounds. I am now able to say most things i want to say. it may have poor grammar, and make use of words like "this thing" but i can say most things i want to... however, i don't always understand the response, but hey, they are supposed to be learning English anyway!
There is no such thing as a normal day, and there are so many different activities it's easy to lose track! but i'll try describing some of the things i've done. until 2006, the reserve was just a normal, natural piece of rainforest, with animals living there, small communities (ie, 5 wooden huts) scattered about nearby, and walking tracks were used to get from A to B. but in 2006, the government built a road thorugh the middle of the reserve, and now a lot of the projects we are doing are to assess the effect which the road has on animal populations and behaviour. Here are some of the things we've been doing:
Butterflies:
To see how the road affects butterfly prevalence, butterfly traps are set up on the road, and then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, and 500m away from the road, and the catches are compared. this is done in 4 different sites, and each time with a trap at ground level, and a trap in the canopy (12m ish). A butterfly trap is a brown plastic tray a foot in diameter, with some manky mushed up banana in it, and above that, a cylinder of mozzie net about a metre in height. the butterflies are drawn in by the yummy overripe sickly smelling bananas, and then when they want to leave they fly upwards and are thus trapped! we come along every day and empty the traps. you genereally find 0 or 1 butterfly per trap. the butterfly is then ID'd to species level, and marked on its wings so that recaptures can be studied if possible, and then the butterfly is realeased. I've only done this project once so far, and it's easy enough to do the traps, but the terrain is shockingly bad - see below
Mammals:
They are going to begin a project checking the prevalence of mammals at various intervals up to 1km from the road, and these tracks need to be cut into the forest, so at the moment, going mammaling entails going into untouched jungle, and cutting tracks into it. it seems kind of weird, as when i knew i was coming to the Amazon, i never for a moment thought i'd be cutting it down! we use machetes and we only cut a small trail, and it is actually really good fun. we only cut down small plants that are in the way, and the forest fights back, as any track which is left for a couple of weeks, it's really hard to find where it was! again, the terrain is crazy and ridiculously difficult, see below. Once the tracks are up and running, they'll use sand pads to look for prints.
Pitfalls:
They are monitoring which types of habitats (primary, untouched; secondary, farmed with coconuts or coffee plants; or riparian, near the river) frogs and lizards prefer. there are 4 buckets set into the ground, with plasitic sheeting held vertically between them, and when a frog or lizard comes upon it, it can't get over the plastic, so tries to go around, and in doing so, falls into a bucket. we check these every day; the animals are ID'd to species level, measured and weighed, then released. it's normal to find 2 or 3 in a morning.
Point counts:
They are seeing the effect of the road on bird populations at various distances from the road, and so this project involves going to various points, one on the road, then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m and 500m from the raod, and sitting for 10 minutes and listening for bird calls, and writing down all the bird calls we hear. Yay!! this is one of my favourite activities as i know loads of bird calls (but we are learning more all the time) and it's fun and peaceful to sit and listen to the sounds of the rainforest. you can generally hear about 10 or more species calling at any one point. again, hte terrain is crazily difficult between each point though. see below.
Mist netting:
I can't quite remember the reason for the mist netting experiment - whether it is to monitor the effects of the road, or something else. anyway, it involves setting up mist nets to catch birds in flight. a mist net is a really fine mesh which you really can't see and can accidentally walk into it if you're not looking! the nets are opened, and are then checked every half hour, and any birds are removed, and then ID'd to species level, measured, weighed, and then released. in a morning (say 5 hours) we might catch between 2 and 15 birds.
The terrain:
as mentiioned above, the terrain here is crazily difficult to get around. whether on a newly cut track, or an old faithful, the floor is muddy, with wet leaves and dead sticks all over the place, which makes it really skiddy and slippy eveen on the flat, but the land is never flat, and you go up for say 40 paces, then down a hill for 40, then along a stream for a minute, then climb up another bank, then down the next one... and if the mud weren't difficult enough on its own, there are loose rocks, roots sticking out of the ground, vines that are like nature's tripwires, all working together to make you fall over and skid down hills on your arse or knees. You're not supposed to grab onto trees or roots in case they have spiders or thorns or they are loose, but you can't help it, and if they are loose or rotten or whatever, you slide down the bank. the gradient is often above 45 degrees, and somtimes it's almost vertical! it can be a lot of fun to scramble around in this way, but you can also get lots of bruises and you are always covered in mud.
the weather here is around 30'C in the daytime, but ridiculously humid. the humidity reading is usually aroung 98%, but sometimes it's been 100%... i would have thought that that meants we were actually IN water, but maybe not. suffice it to say that it's bloody humid. if i put on a dry tshirt and go out on a walk, within half an hour the sweat patches are bigger than the dry patches, and i can cover the whole thing in sweat within 2.5 hours. yes, the whole tshirt soaked with sweat. that is my record, but i think i could beat it. my legs ache from all the going up and down - it's like going up and down stairs for a few hours a day! i am definitely getting fitter but i am also getting knackered! it's really hard work but i am enjoying it.
as for the animals, well, i haven't seen a great deal really. i've heard loads of birds calling, but only seen a few actually in the trees - the vast majortiy of the birds i've seen have been in the mist netting traps, and the same with lizards and frogs. i've only seen one or two animals just being wild... but i've seen 2 or 3 snakes though, but still that doesn't seem that many considering how long i've been here.
We are on a privately owned reserve, which is what a lot of the amazon rainforest actually is (i assumed it was a national park) but no, it{s owned by a charity/company. this company (Yachana) has our reserve, where GVI do their stuff, plus there is an ecotourist lodge, and there is a school / technical college partner, where indigineous kids from poor families can get a propeor education, learn about the importance of their rainforest, and get trained in a trade such as ecotourism, and then get jobs which will help protect the rainforest. this is becasue local families own land, which is part of the amazon rainforest, and becasue they own it, they often use the land for farming, felling trees and destroying habitat in hte process, so it makes sense to teach the children of these families taht their land - their rainforest - is worth more to the planet (and them) in its natural state, than if it is farmed. that knowledge, and training the children for another trade other tahn farming, is probably the best way to save the rainforest.
so a big part of the project is to work in conjunction iwth the school, where 3 or 4 students a month come over to our bit of the reserve to learn english and do waht we do, and we also visit local schools and teach them english. i did this last week, and it was hard work but good fun. the kids were aged between 6 and 8, and me and anotehr girl, Jane, who loathes and despises children and really did not want to teach them, had to teach them classroom objects and prepositions - the book is on the table. this was pretty daunting, as they all speak Spanish or Quichua as their first language, and don't know much english, and we had to go in for an hour, maintain control, and get them to learn stuff. like all kids, they were boistrous, had really short atention spans, and wanted to play the running around games rather than writing sentences! but they loved high fives, and we played loads of games with them. we have also gone to another small community on starudays to introduce the kids - who are left by themselves all day, ranging in age from babies to 10 years ish - to teach them a bit of english to build bridges with the communities and keep then out of trouble for a bit. it's quite scary to teach children who know literally no english - this was their first lesson, and we taught them to say hello, how are you, i'm fine, whathn's your name, my name is, plus 6 animals they'll see around them. but it's good to discover the international language of things like skipping, football, frisbee, tickling, chasing, drawing in the sand, piggy backs, and they LOVED people's digital cameras, and would take them off you and they took over 300 photos on Tim's camera, i think!
So overall it's good so far. i do have a few gripes, but they are outweighed by the fun of it all. We are on our way to Hector's Island today, and have stopped in a town called Coca before we get the canoe over to his island, where there are monkeys, and all kinds of cool animals which we will see.
Some of my favourite moments so far:
- Catherine eating a whole bowl of chilli sauce for a dare/bet
- Spanglishing with the Ecuadorians all the time, and talking to Galo about chocolate and Jiu Jitsu
- Going on Sat Camp, where we slept out in jungle hammocks and ate baked potatoes
- seeing birds and other animals up close
- me biting people, and having Ella, Laura nd Hayley call me "the evil one"
- wathicng the same dreadful "hi, my name is your name, i'm an emergency first responder, may i help you?" videos i've already seen in CR!
- macheteing new paths and scrambling up muddy hillsides
- the night walk where we ended up wading in water up to our necks, with our backpacks held over our heads!
- the game nights, like when we had to make things out of 10 random objects, and i did a pass the parcel with forfeits!
- teaching the kids and having fun with them
- Ella going crazy and doiung running commentaires on card games
- knowing loads of bird calls
- lying in "my" yellow hammock all the time in the comedor
- hanging out with fun people :o)
The Ecuador project is along similar lines to CR, there are 18 volunteers and we live in a camp in the middle of nowhere. We are in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, and the landscape is really hilly and with loads of little streams here, there and everywhere. When it rains it gets really muddy, and we spend our lives in trousers and wellies, skidding down hillsides on our bums! the camp consists of wooden buildings on stilts, there's the kitchen and comedor (dining room) which is where we spend most of our time when on camp, then there are the volunteer dorms - there are 5 guys and 13 girls, and i am in a dorm with 4 other girls, but all the dorms are in the same hut, so you can hear everything right down to farts and snoring from the other dorms! There is another building where the staff live, and there is a small library (room with a table and a few dozen books) plus another hut for the Ecuadorians who stay on the reserve with us. Of course, there are also showers (freezing cold ones!) and toilets, which are over 100 paces away from my bedroom, and 35 of those paces are actual steps. like i said, it's so hilly here that we are permanently going up and down steps and hills... my leg muscles are like Arnold Schwarzenegger's now!
The other volunteers are mostly from England (Ella, Hayley, Laura, Sherry, Nicky, Hells, Sasha, Jane, Jamie, and Phil are all English) then there's Rikard from Sweden, Bells and Mark from Ireland, Kristen and Catherine from America, and Tim from Australia. We are a mixture of people here for 6 months, 10 weeks, and 5 weeks. Plus there are the staff: Andy, Olly, and Caroline from England, Jaz from Australia, Jenn from Canada, and Mel from America. Added to that are 4 Ecuadroians who are staying on the camp at the moment (new students come every month) and they are Isaac (the teacher) plus David, Cristian and Galo - they are students at the technical college we are partnered with and they come onto our camp to help them learn English.
I tend to hang around mostly with Ella, Hayley and Laura, or the Ecuadorian lads, as my Spanish is coming on in leaps and bounds. I am now able to say most things i want to say. it may have poor grammar, and make use of words like "this thing" but i can say most things i want to... however, i don't always understand the response, but hey, they are supposed to be learning English anyway!
There is no such thing as a normal day, and there are so many different activities it's easy to lose track! but i'll try describing some of the things i've done. until 2006, the reserve was just a normal, natural piece of rainforest, with animals living there, small communities (ie, 5 wooden huts) scattered about nearby, and walking tracks were used to get from A to B. but in 2006, the government built a road thorugh the middle of the reserve, and now a lot of the projects we are doing are to assess the effect which the road has on animal populations and behaviour. Here are some of the things we've been doing:
Butterflies:
To see how the road affects butterfly prevalence, butterfly traps are set up on the road, and then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, and 500m away from the road, and the catches are compared. this is done in 4 different sites, and each time with a trap at ground level, and a trap in the canopy (12m ish). A butterfly trap is a brown plastic tray a foot in diameter, with some manky mushed up banana in it, and above that, a cylinder of mozzie net about a metre in height. the butterflies are drawn in by the yummy overripe sickly smelling bananas, and then when they want to leave they fly upwards and are thus trapped! we come along every day and empty the traps. you genereally find 0 or 1 butterfly per trap. the butterfly is then ID'd to species level, and marked on its wings so that recaptures can be studied if possible, and then the butterfly is realeased. I've only done this project once so far, and it's easy enough to do the traps, but the terrain is shockingly bad - see below
Mammals:
They are going to begin a project checking the prevalence of mammals at various intervals up to 1km from the road, and these tracks need to be cut into the forest, so at the moment, going mammaling entails going into untouched jungle, and cutting tracks into it. it seems kind of weird, as when i knew i was coming to the Amazon, i never for a moment thought i'd be cutting it down! we use machetes and we only cut a small trail, and it is actually really good fun. we only cut down small plants that are in the way, and the forest fights back, as any track which is left for a couple of weeks, it's really hard to find where it was! again, the terrain is crazy and ridiculously difficult, see below. Once the tracks are up and running, they'll use sand pads to look for prints.
Pitfalls:
They are monitoring which types of habitats (primary, untouched; secondary, farmed with coconuts or coffee plants; or riparian, near the river) frogs and lizards prefer. there are 4 buckets set into the ground, with plasitic sheeting held vertically between them, and when a frog or lizard comes upon it, it can't get over the plastic, so tries to go around, and in doing so, falls into a bucket. we check these every day; the animals are ID'd to species level, measured and weighed, then released. it's normal to find 2 or 3 in a morning.
Point counts:
They are seeing the effect of the road on bird populations at various distances from the road, and so this project involves going to various points, one on the road, then 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m and 500m from the raod, and sitting for 10 minutes and listening for bird calls, and writing down all the bird calls we hear. Yay!! this is one of my favourite activities as i know loads of bird calls (but we are learning more all the time) and it's fun and peaceful to sit and listen to the sounds of the rainforest. you can generally hear about 10 or more species calling at any one point. again, hte terrain is crazily difficult between each point though. see below.
Mist netting:
I can't quite remember the reason for the mist netting experiment - whether it is to monitor the effects of the road, or something else. anyway, it involves setting up mist nets to catch birds in flight. a mist net is a really fine mesh which you really can't see and can accidentally walk into it if you're not looking! the nets are opened, and are then checked every half hour, and any birds are removed, and then ID'd to species level, measured, weighed, and then released. in a morning (say 5 hours) we might catch between 2 and 15 birds.
it's a lot of fun seeing animals up close like we do here, but some people (me included at times) have been concerned that the processes are unnecessarily cruel. i don't think any of the projects are that cruel though. it's probabaly not a fun experience for the animals, but they are processed (ID'd, weighed and measured and released) in a couple of minutes, or about 10 minutes fro the birds. it didn't sit well with me initially, but now i am confident that the animals are not harmed in any way, and the second they are released, i'm sure they aren't stressed out any more, and forget about it pretty quick
The terrain:
as mentiioned above, the terrain here is crazily difficult to get around. whether on a newly cut track, or an old faithful, the floor is muddy, with wet leaves and dead sticks all over the place, which makes it really skiddy and slippy eveen on the flat, but the land is never flat, and you go up for say 40 paces, then down a hill for 40, then along a stream for a minute, then climb up another bank, then down the next one... and if the mud weren't difficult enough on its own, there are loose rocks, roots sticking out of the ground, vines that are like nature's tripwires, all working together to make you fall over and skid down hills on your arse or knees. You're not supposed to grab onto trees or roots in case they have spiders or thorns or they are loose, but you can't help it, and if they are loose or rotten or whatever, you slide down the bank. the gradient is often above 45 degrees, and somtimes it's almost vertical! it can be a lot of fun to scramble around in this way, but you can also get lots of bruises and you are always covered in mud.
the weather here is around 30'C in the daytime, but ridiculously humid. the humidity reading is usually aroung 98%, but sometimes it's been 100%... i would have thought that that meants we were actually IN water, but maybe not. suffice it to say that it's bloody humid. if i put on a dry tshirt and go out on a walk, within half an hour the sweat patches are bigger than the dry patches, and i can cover the whole thing in sweat within 2.5 hours. yes, the whole tshirt soaked with sweat. that is my record, but i think i could beat it. my legs ache from all the going up and down - it's like going up and down stairs for a few hours a day! i am definitely getting fitter but i am also getting knackered! it's really hard work but i am enjoying it.
as for the animals, well, i haven't seen a great deal really. i've heard loads of birds calling, but only seen a few actually in the trees - the vast majortiy of the birds i've seen have been in the mist netting traps, and the same with lizards and frogs. i've only seen one or two animals just being wild... but i've seen 2 or 3 snakes though, but still that doesn't seem that many considering how long i've been here.
We are on a privately owned reserve, which is what a lot of the amazon rainforest actually is (i assumed it was a national park) but no, it{s owned by a charity/company. this company (Yachana) has our reserve, where GVI do their stuff, plus there is an ecotourist lodge, and there is a school / technical college partner, where indigineous kids from poor families can get a propeor education, learn about the importance of their rainforest, and get trained in a trade such as ecotourism, and then get jobs which will help protect the rainforest. this is becasue local families own land, which is part of the amazon rainforest, and becasue they own it, they often use the land for farming, felling trees and destroying habitat in hte process, so it makes sense to teach the children of these families taht their land - their rainforest - is worth more to the planet (and them) in its natural state, than if it is farmed. that knowledge, and training the children for another trade other tahn farming, is probably the best way to save the rainforest.
so a big part of the project is to work in conjunction iwth the school, where 3 or 4 students a month come over to our bit of the reserve to learn english and do waht we do, and we also visit local schools and teach them english. i did this last week, and it was hard work but good fun. the kids were aged between 6 and 8, and me and anotehr girl, Jane, who loathes and despises children and really did not want to teach them, had to teach them classroom objects and prepositions - the book is on the table. this was pretty daunting, as they all speak Spanish or Quichua as their first language, and don't know much english, and we had to go in for an hour, maintain control, and get them to learn stuff. like all kids, they were boistrous, had really short atention spans, and wanted to play the running around games rather than writing sentences! but they loved high fives, and we played loads of games with them. we have also gone to another small community on starudays to introduce the kids - who are left by themselves all day, ranging in age from babies to 10 years ish - to teach them a bit of english to build bridges with the communities and keep then out of trouble for a bit. it's quite scary to teach children who know literally no english - this was their first lesson, and we taught them to say hello, how are you, i'm fine, whathn's your name, my name is, plus 6 animals they'll see around them. but it's good to discover the international language of things like skipping, football, frisbee, tickling, chasing, drawing in the sand, piggy backs, and they LOVED people's digital cameras, and would take them off you and they took over 300 photos on Tim's camera, i think!
So overall it's good so far. i do have a few gripes, but they are outweighed by the fun of it all. We are on our way to Hector's Island today, and have stopped in a town called Coca before we get the canoe over to his island, where there are monkeys, and all kinds of cool animals which we will see.
Some of my favourite moments so far:
- Catherine eating a whole bowl of chilli sauce for a dare/bet
- Spanglishing with the Ecuadorians all the time, and talking to Galo about chocolate and Jiu Jitsu
- Going on Sat Camp, where we slept out in jungle hammocks and ate baked potatoes
- seeing birds and other animals up close
- me biting people, and having Ella, Laura nd Hayley call me "the evil one"
- wathicng the same dreadful "hi, my name is your name, i'm an emergency first responder, may i help you?" videos i've already seen in CR!
- macheteing new paths and scrambling up muddy hillsides
- the night walk where we ended up wading in water up to our necks, with our backpacks held over our heads!
- the game nights, like when we had to make things out of 10 random objects, and i did a pass the parcel with forfeits!
- teaching the kids and having fun with them
- Ella going crazy and doiung running commentaires on card games
- knowing loads of bird calls
- lying in "my" yellow hammock all the time in the comedor
- hanging out with fun people :o)
Saturday, 2 October 2010
Getting to Ecuador
Well, not one person has sent me a concerned email... I received one message on Facebookfrom my sister asking me if I was OK. This either means that no one kinows about the trouble that happened in Ecuador on 30th September while i was trying to fly there, or no one cares. I'll try to assume it's the former.
So, here´s the story in detail: On 30 September, I was in Cancun, Mexico, and was about to fly to Quito, Ecuador. I needed to change planes in Panama City (in Panama!) but didn´t foresee any problems.
I got up in the morning at 4.30am, and was sharing a taxi to the airport with an Irish couple, who were also flying to Quito, but they were changing in Miami (yes that is completely in the worng dircection, but hey!). So, the taxi was due to come at 5am, but at quarter past, we were still waiting, and phoned the taxi company. they said they were on their way - funny that, taxis are always on their way when you call them, aren´t they!?) by 20 past it still hadn´t come, so we decided to get a taxi from the taxi booth, then our pre-booked taxi turned up so we got in it and told him to hurry up. At some point during the journey, the Irish guy asked me what airline i was flying with, and i told him Copa, and I thought nothing more of it. When we arrived at the airport, we said goodbye to each otehr, and i looked around for the Copa airlines stand... it wasn´t there. i asked a member of staff and they said that Copa is in Terminal 2, but this was Terminal 3.Then i realised what had happened. the taxi driver had asked the couple what airline they were with, and they´d said american, and they probably thought he was just asking out of interest, so just asked me out of interest, and then never told the taxi driver i was with Copa. Bugger. so i was now running late too and had to get a shuttle bus to terminal 3. but it was ok, i booked in, and waited for the flight.
In Panama City, as i got off the plane, when i got to the gate where we were boarding for Quito, they said there was a slight delay. Within half an hour later, they said Quito was in chaos, the police and military were trying to kill the President because he´d cut their pay, so 100,000 police and military had barricaded the airport and no flights were going in to or out of Quito, and we'd probably be best just to go back to our own country, because we probably can't get into Quito for days and days. Lots of people were concerned, obviously, but the airport staff suggested flying to Lima instead. A couple i´d been talking to who were travelling around South America decided to do that, as did many others.
I was ringing GVI and asking them what was goign on, if i should wait in Panama, go somewhere else, or what. they didn´t have any more information than i did, and events were unfolding as we waited, so i kept phoning them back in an hour... then another hour. They suggested flying home to England as well, but as far as I was concerned, taht was not an option: in England I have no job till January, and would be cutting short a trip i´ve been plannign for a year, so I didn´t really see goign to England as a viable option. I phoned Stephan, who was in charge of the project I´d juswt been on in Costa Rica, but they were full up and hadn´t heard about waht was happening in Ecuador anyway.
At length, after a few phone calls, they said there was some space on a project in Guatemala, and the thing in Ecuador was unlikely to just blow over, as the President had said no way would he back down. Military and Police versus the Government is not a recipe for happy holidays, so i needed to have a good think about what my options were. It was a nightmare trying to find out any information in the airport, i was just surrounded by fifty angry people yelling in Spanish at the airport staff, who were yelling back in spanish, gesturing "it´s not my fault" kind of gestures, and everyone was asking questions and they were answering them, but it was all in spanish and i had not a clue what was going on. That was really stressful, as i was even more in the dark than everyone else was, and everyone just mobbed the staff and yelled at them. it was crazy.
i asked someone in the airport where i could fly to instead of Quito, and she said i could fly anywhere really... as long as i paid for it. i asked if the people who´d flown to Lima had done so for free, and she said no, and i asked if they were crossing the border over land in a bus or something (not knowing where Lima was) and she said no, they were just staying in Lima.
the couple who had decided to go to Lima instead said they´d heard that our bags weren´t in a secure location, so the three of us went down to get them. we walked throug himmigration, bold as you like and unchallenged. no one looked at documents or anthiyng. then in baggage reclaim, there were bags in a big pile which anyone could have picked up at any time, and we picked up our bags, and then went BACK through immigration THE WRONG WAY, and a guy said to me "hey! you can´t come back through here!" and i didn´t want him to force me to get out of the airport through customs, so i replied something vague like "Oh it´s ok, that guy upstairs said we should" and kept walking. no one came after us or bothered to challenge us after that!
i tried to find out some more information from airport staff, but that just invovled a lot of shouting between customers and staff, in spanish, everyone getting angry and having a go (needlessly) at the airport staff, who were probably as much in the dark as we were. Well, not as much as me, becasue everyone was yelling in spanish and asking questions in spanish and getting ansswers in spanish and i couldn´t understand any of it. it was not fun.
At length, when i finally managed to get someone to talk to me, i said to them that i would fly to Guatemala now, instead of Quito, and the guy from the airport said it proabably wasn´t such a good idea for me to fly to Guatemala, as i had no ticket out of there, so they might not let me in. he also said that it was his personal opinion that the thing in Quito would blow over quickly (even though the news was saying people were going crazy, looting, robbing, murdering, and the police were rioting and it could take days or weeks to sort out) but the airport guy said he thoguht it might be a quick thing, and the airport were going to put up stranded travellers in a hotel, and give them free food. so i thought i may as well wait and see what heppened.
A Slovakian girl who spoke good english was then sat nearby and she said if they opened the airport, was i actually going to fly into quito as she was looking at the news online and it said there were robberies, murders, muggings, looting etc. becasue there were no police, and Ecuador would be in turmoil, so did i really want to go there... based on that info, probabaly not... but then she spoke to her boyfriend in Quito who said that actually nothing seemed that bad, and people try to kill the president all the time and it´s pretty normal stuff. he said the streets were nowhere near as crazy as the news made out. so we decided we´d stay in the hotel together and reassess in the morning.
unless i haven´t stressed this enough, there was a lot of waiting around in between all these dribs and drabs of information. i was waiting at the airport for 14 hours in total. they split us up into groups and said we would go to the hotel. in my group were 2 guys from Netherlands, and 2 from Ecuador who were trying to get home. the Ecuadorian guys said stuff like this always happens and don´t be alarmed, it would be fine.
in the five star hotel, I had "dinner" of boiled vegetables (the only veggie food they had!) and strawberry smoothie, before sharing a hotel room with the Slovakian girl i´d known for an hour, with all my luggage (hers was stuck in Amsterdam) and she said i could stay with her boyfriend in Quito if GVI couln´dt pick me up - if indeed we managed to get there. Of course thoughy, i don´t know if she´s genuinely nice or a drugs mule. But i thought i may as well trust her as she was the only person I knew and she had let me use her laptop and things.
I woke up the next morning and got the taxi to the airport with the Dutch and Ecuadorians, and one of the guys from Ecuador checked the news and Quito was now open, and it seemed to be business as usual. In the queue i used his phone to phone GVI to ask what i should do now, and they said they didn´t know. again i threw caution to the wind and went on the advice of the Ecudorians, and just go to Quito.
This i did, and told GVI i was coming to Quito, and everythign went swimmingly after that. I landed in Quito, and they was met at the airport by two staff members called Jen and Karina... i can´t tell you how happy i was to see taht GVI logo as i was coming out into the lounge - it was such a relief to know i´d made it and i was safe. we went to the hostel then, wehere everyone else was staying, and that kind of brings me up to now.
There are now 19 of us at the hostel: i think about 12 made it before the trouble started, i was stuck in Panama, 3 were diverted to Lima, one is still in Lima, and anotheri is stuck in America and America says itñ´s not safe to leave the co9untry still. but seriously, everything here seems totally normal and safe. we are going out in groups, but that makes good sense anyway. it´s as if nothing ever happened!
* * *
So we are now waiting here for the one person who is stuck in Lima - they arrive tonighht - and then tomorrow we are off to the jungle - yeah baby!!
the volunteers... my new pals... there are 4 guys and 15 girls; one from Australia, two from Ireland, two from America, one Swedish, and the rest are English. we are in Quito which although it is on the equator, it´s 3000 metres above sea level and it´s freezing (about 20´C!) so i slept last night in trousers and two long sleeve tops - brrr!
we have been told that the drive to camp will take 2 days, and i think we will get one or two more chances in the next day or so to go online, then we will be completely out of communication range, so consider yourself duly warned: I WILL NOT BE IN TOUCH!!!
It looks and seems like the project should be as good fun as the one in CR, with lots of bird calls to learn (yay!), and to identify loads of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates by sight... I can´t wait for it all to begin. we will be 2 days behind schedule but considering what happened in Quito airport, that seems like nothing.
when we arrive at camp, we have to carry all our belongings up 268 steps... my bags are ridiculously heavy ,and i spent $18 thismorning on snacks which should keep me goign for the next 5 weeks. i couldn´t find ANY chocolate, never mind cadbury´s so i am goign to have to properly go cold turkey!!
Hopefully there will be no more hiccups and the fun and learning can begin in earnest! :D
So, here´s the story in detail: On 30 September, I was in Cancun, Mexico, and was about to fly to Quito, Ecuador. I needed to change planes in Panama City (in Panama!) but didn´t foresee any problems.
I got up in the morning at 4.30am, and was sharing a taxi to the airport with an Irish couple, who were also flying to Quito, but they were changing in Miami (yes that is completely in the worng dircection, but hey!). So, the taxi was due to come at 5am, but at quarter past, we were still waiting, and phoned the taxi company. they said they were on their way - funny that, taxis are always on their way when you call them, aren´t they!?) by 20 past it still hadn´t come, so we decided to get a taxi from the taxi booth, then our pre-booked taxi turned up so we got in it and told him to hurry up. At some point during the journey, the Irish guy asked me what airline i was flying with, and i told him Copa, and I thought nothing more of it. When we arrived at the airport, we said goodbye to each otehr, and i looked around for the Copa airlines stand... it wasn´t there. i asked a member of staff and they said that Copa is in Terminal 2, but this was Terminal 3.Then i realised what had happened. the taxi driver had asked the couple what airline they were with, and they´d said american, and they probably thought he was just asking out of interest, so just asked me out of interest, and then never told the taxi driver i was with Copa. Bugger. so i was now running late too and had to get a shuttle bus to terminal 3. but it was ok, i booked in, and waited for the flight.
In Panama City, as i got off the plane, when i got to the gate where we were boarding for Quito, they said there was a slight delay. Within half an hour later, they said Quito was in chaos, the police and military were trying to kill the President because he´d cut their pay, so 100,000 police and military had barricaded the airport and no flights were going in to or out of Quito, and we'd probably be best just to go back to our own country, because we probably can't get into Quito for days and days. Lots of people were concerned, obviously, but the airport staff suggested flying to Lima instead. A couple i´d been talking to who were travelling around South America decided to do that, as did many others.
I was ringing GVI and asking them what was goign on, if i should wait in Panama, go somewhere else, or what. they didn´t have any more information than i did, and events were unfolding as we waited, so i kept phoning them back in an hour... then another hour. They suggested flying home to England as well, but as far as I was concerned, taht was not an option: in England I have no job till January, and would be cutting short a trip i´ve been plannign for a year, so I didn´t really see goign to England as a viable option. I phoned Stephan, who was in charge of the project I´d juswt been on in Costa Rica, but they were full up and hadn´t heard about waht was happening in Ecuador anyway.
At length, after a few phone calls, they said there was some space on a project in Guatemala, and the thing in Ecuador was unlikely to just blow over, as the President had said no way would he back down. Military and Police versus the Government is not a recipe for happy holidays, so i needed to have a good think about what my options were. It was a nightmare trying to find out any information in the airport, i was just surrounded by fifty angry people yelling in Spanish at the airport staff, who were yelling back in spanish, gesturing "it´s not my fault" kind of gestures, and everyone was asking questions and they were answering them, but it was all in spanish and i had not a clue what was going on. That was really stressful, as i was even more in the dark than everyone else was, and everyone just mobbed the staff and yelled at them. it was crazy.
i asked someone in the airport where i could fly to instead of Quito, and she said i could fly anywhere really... as long as i paid for it. i asked if the people who´d flown to Lima had done so for free, and she said no, and i asked if they were crossing the border over land in a bus or something (not knowing where Lima was) and she said no, they were just staying in Lima.
the couple who had decided to go to Lima instead said they´d heard that our bags weren´t in a secure location, so the three of us went down to get them. we walked throug himmigration, bold as you like and unchallenged. no one looked at documents or anthiyng. then in baggage reclaim, there were bags in a big pile which anyone could have picked up at any time, and we picked up our bags, and then went BACK through immigration THE WRONG WAY, and a guy said to me "hey! you can´t come back through here!" and i didn´t want him to force me to get out of the airport through customs, so i replied something vague like "Oh it´s ok, that guy upstairs said we should" and kept walking. no one came after us or bothered to challenge us after that!
i tried to find out some more information from airport staff, but that just invovled a lot of shouting between customers and staff, in spanish, everyone getting angry and having a go (needlessly) at the airport staff, who were probably as much in the dark as we were. Well, not as much as me, becasue everyone was yelling in spanish and asking questions in spanish and getting ansswers in spanish and i couldn´t understand any of it. it was not fun.
At length, when i finally managed to get someone to talk to me, i said to them that i would fly to Guatemala now, instead of Quito, and the guy from the airport said it proabably wasn´t such a good idea for me to fly to Guatemala, as i had no ticket out of there, so they might not let me in. he also said that it was his personal opinion that the thing in Quito would blow over quickly (even though the news was saying people were going crazy, looting, robbing, murdering, and the police were rioting and it could take days or weeks to sort out) but the airport guy said he thoguht it might be a quick thing, and the airport were going to put up stranded travellers in a hotel, and give them free food. so i thought i may as well wait and see what heppened.
A Slovakian girl who spoke good english was then sat nearby and she said if they opened the airport, was i actually going to fly into quito as she was looking at the news online and it said there were robberies, murders, muggings, looting etc. becasue there were no police, and Ecuador would be in turmoil, so did i really want to go there... based on that info, probabaly not... but then she spoke to her boyfriend in Quito who said that actually nothing seemed that bad, and people try to kill the president all the time and it´s pretty normal stuff. he said the streets were nowhere near as crazy as the news made out. so we decided we´d stay in the hotel together and reassess in the morning.
unless i haven´t stressed this enough, there was a lot of waiting around in between all these dribs and drabs of information. i was waiting at the airport for 14 hours in total. they split us up into groups and said we would go to the hotel. in my group were 2 guys from Netherlands, and 2 from Ecuador who were trying to get home. the Ecuadorian guys said stuff like this always happens and don´t be alarmed, it would be fine.
in the five star hotel, I had "dinner" of boiled vegetables (the only veggie food they had!) and strawberry smoothie, before sharing a hotel room with the Slovakian girl i´d known for an hour, with all my luggage (hers was stuck in Amsterdam) and she said i could stay with her boyfriend in Quito if GVI couln´dt pick me up - if indeed we managed to get there. Of course thoughy, i don´t know if she´s genuinely nice or a drugs mule. But i thought i may as well trust her as she was the only person I knew and she had let me use her laptop and things.
I woke up the next morning and got the taxi to the airport with the Dutch and Ecuadorians, and one of the guys from Ecuador checked the news and Quito was now open, and it seemed to be business as usual. In the queue i used his phone to phone GVI to ask what i should do now, and they said they didn´t know. again i threw caution to the wind and went on the advice of the Ecudorians, and just go to Quito.
This i did, and told GVI i was coming to Quito, and everythign went swimmingly after that. I landed in Quito, and they was met at the airport by two staff members called Jen and Karina... i can´t tell you how happy i was to see taht GVI logo as i was coming out into the lounge - it was such a relief to know i´d made it and i was safe. we went to the hostel then, wehere everyone else was staying, and that kind of brings me up to now.
There are now 19 of us at the hostel: i think about 12 made it before the trouble started, i was stuck in Panama, 3 were diverted to Lima, one is still in Lima, and anotheri is stuck in America and America says itñ´s not safe to leave the co9untry still. but seriously, everything here seems totally normal and safe. we are going out in groups, but that makes good sense anyway. it´s as if nothing ever happened!
* * *
So we are now waiting here for the one person who is stuck in Lima - they arrive tonighht - and then tomorrow we are off to the jungle - yeah baby!!
the volunteers... my new pals... there are 4 guys and 15 girls; one from Australia, two from Ireland, two from America, one Swedish, and the rest are English. we are in Quito which although it is on the equator, it´s 3000 metres above sea level and it´s freezing (about 20´C!) so i slept last night in trousers and two long sleeve tops - brrr!
we have been told that the drive to camp will take 2 days, and i think we will get one or two more chances in the next day or so to go online, then we will be completely out of communication range, so consider yourself duly warned: I WILL NOT BE IN TOUCH!!!
It looks and seems like the project should be as good fun as the one in CR, with lots of bird calls to learn (yay!), and to identify loads of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates by sight... I can´t wait for it all to begin. we will be 2 days behind schedule but considering what happened in Quito airport, that seems like nothing.
when we arrive at camp, we have to carry all our belongings up 268 steps... my bags are ridiculously heavy ,and i spent $18 thismorning on snacks which should keep me goign for the next 5 weeks. i couldn´t find ANY chocolate, never mind cadbury´s so i am goign to have to properly go cold turkey!!
Hopefully there will be no more hiccups and the fun and learning can begin in earnest! :D
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