it´s been a couple of weeks since i´ve been online, and everything here is still going great. it´s the rainy season now, and it rains nearly every day, but it´s still about 28•C so still a nice temperature. life on the reserve is continuing as normal: we go out on surveys to look at the effect of the road - doing point counts (listening to bird calls), mist netting (catching birds), pitfalls (catching amphibs and reptiles), butterflies, and mammals.... it´s all good, and i´ve explained what the surveys entail.
new people have arrived (well, they´re not new any more) and some of the previous people have left. i miss some of the people who have left, but i can´t do anything about that. travelling round and having great experiences is inevitably followed by sadness of being separated from people who, in all likelihoood, i will never see again. i my family and friends in england, of course, but it seems more poignant when you are in the place where the person used to be, but now without that person. i guess that´s how the people in England feel without me. but i know i will see all of them again so that´s good :D i am looking forward to seeing everyone again, to seeing how much my nephews have grown, and how much my sister has shrunk! and to eating fruit, cadburys, veggie burgers, and NOT BEANS!!!
this weekend we are off to Yasuni National Park, which is one pf the most bilogically diverse regions in the world. they say we should see parrots and all knids of exciting stuff there - cool. i think we´ll be stopping here (Coca) on the way home, so hopefully i´ll be in touch again then. then the next time after that i´ll be online will be when i´m in quito and en route home :S
my typing is a bit crap at the moment because i have injured one of my fingers - of all the crazy, dangerous things we do out here, from trekking over ridiculously muddy terrain, weidling machetes and chopping pathways, carrying heavy bags, being surrounded by dangerous animals, i went and cut a slice off my finger when chopping vegetables! ouch! i was also bitten on my hand by a bullet ant, which was really painful at the time, and even thoug h it is 5 days later now, i can still feel it. I also found my second tick of this trip, which hurts as well, but at least i didn´t have to extract it while in the departure lounge of an airport, like i did with th other one! we also continue to get mobbed by biting ants, mozzies (although not that much, maybe one a day?) and sweat bees. these - as the name suggests - are attracted to your swaet, and that is something which i have in abundance, so at times you spend your whole time waving your açrms around your head and spazzing out for lenthy periods to try and get rid of them. bug spray seems to attract more insects, although they don´t land on you, they just buzz round you ALL THE TIME. i definietly will not be sad to see the back of them.
exciting things that have ahappened in the past 3 weeks are that we saw a rainbow boa in camp - they are probably hte most beautiful snake i´ve ever seen, and are orangey purple, with big black circles, one of the girls saw it at about 9.30pm, when most of us are going to bed, and she yelled "SNAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!" (aas is the done thing) but a load of people thought she was trying to commit a murder (more on that in a minute) so didn´t go, but i went and took my camera and was the only one who managed to get a good photo of it before it went off into the undergrowth. so that was really cool.
so, murders... we have been playing a game of camp cluedo, where everyone fishes into a bag and pulls out a name, a place, and a weapon. they then have to ´kill´that person in the said way and place, and when you kill someone, then you take the person who they were going to kill, and it kweeps going till there´s only one person left. if you get yourself, you have to swap with someone else. mine was that i had to kill Ella in the library with a badminton racquet. lucky for me, ella is my best friend here, so when i suggested we go to look at some lizard photos in the library which we had to learn, it looked pretty innocent. then when çwe got there i said i´d forgotten my pen, so went out, cançme back with the badminton racquet, and said "Ella, i´m sorry - i do want to revise, but i also want to kill you!!" and then ´hit´her with the badminton racquet, and she was dead - ha ha ha!. i then had to take her missions which was to kill Jas at the smoking pit with a toilet roll. unfgortunately, Jas doesn´t smoke so it wouldn´t be easy to get her there. but alas, i was killed by steve on the bridge with the rubber rat before i´d had chance to kill jas. it´s a lo tof fun, and some people have used tactics such as shouting ´snake´to lure their intended victim into asn unlikely place!!
what else? we have organised ´´fun´on saturdqay nights, and we had one wherer we all dressed up as superheroes - a lot of underwear over trousers was worn. i wasn´t sure what to be, but i was making myself a mask out of duck tape, and thought i could put leters onto my tshirt in duck tape, and then other people wanted to use myduck tape, so i decided to be Duck Tape Girl - righting the world´s wrongs throug hthe clever use of duck tape! it was a fun night ,and we all had stupid challenges we had to do, like fising sweets out of a tub of flour using only yourm mouth, or standing on one foot for a long as possible, or eating a spoonful of butterfly bait (2 week old bananas!) i´m sure the pis will make it up onto facebook soon. i can´t rememebr what my challenge was, but we had more challenged the next week, wehn i had to puit a condom over my head and blow it up! i chose this instead of eating a tree tomato, which are truly disgusting vegetables. it´s all vey silly but grat fun. something i really haven´t missed about england is TV. i don´t miss it at all. in our frwee time, we read, write journals, play cards, and just hang out and chat, and i think i will miss that when i´m in enalgand on my own in my lounge in silence.
something else that was fun, was when one of the lads who was a student at our partner college (they go there to study ecotourism, and our money funds their education, and they stay with us to learn englinsh), one of the lads who´d stayed with us came back with a load of friends from his villege, and they came out on a walk, then in the evening we cooked up a mega feast - i was on camp duty that day, and with 5 peaople´s help, we cooked up a banquet of seven different dishes to feed 36 people. then they performed a tradiational shaman ritual, and a quechua dance, before we all went up to the camp fire, and they told us some traditional folk takes from the Quechua tradition. they then went out to sleep in jungle hammocks, and the following morning we all Spanglished - ie, we helped each other learn the language and culture of each other. i expliend to them about how in winter, we build snowmen and go sledging and have snowball fights ,as most of them have never seen snow. they thought it sounded like a lot of fun. and now i´ve been on facebook and seen some of your snow photos, i kind of miss it a bit... hopefully there´ll be some left when i get home. so that was a really good couple of days....
when i knew i was coming out on this trip, i really didn´t care about meeting the locals, not the chidlren, not the students at the college, and not the people living in the huts near to our reserve. but all of those things have been some of the major hirhglights of the trip, and i feel bad now that i had no interest in them before. it´s been great to have the ecuadorian students over, and they became some of my bestfriends. and the kids we teach, they are cheeky and playful, but it´s so reawarding to teach them and play with them, even though you make a total arse of yourself and act like a children´s TV presenter. i never thought i would stand at the front of a classroom wearing a coloured poncho and doing a dance, while singing "verde green, verde gree, azul blue, azul blue,..." with other volunteers doing the same thing. it was either a very low point in my life, or a high one.... at any rate it was memorable! and meeting the communites has pçbeen great. the people of ecuador are hospitable and freindly and they are the main reason i would woant to come back - and beaaxcuse the country is amazingly bearutiful. i need to try and find some things that are bad, so i want to leave...
ok, as we were on the way to the internet cafe, we saw a guy running down the street with a white dog under his arm, then we realised it had no head, and he ran into a butcher´s shop. upon reflection, and the piecuign togerther of information, we now believe that it was an agouti, not a dog, as it´s feet were longer and thinner than a dog. still, it was a horrible moment! and i saw fried guinea pigs in Baños, which was pretty gross. i have a photo. what else? umm... the streets are a bit dirty.
ok i´m running out of things to say now so i will sign off. hopefully i´ll be in touch again in 2-3 days, after Yasuni.
love yáll - happy christmas!
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