Vamos a Ecuador

Meet Team Mojado: Reed, Grayden, and Jenny

Since now I am an adult and have a full-time job I sit at a desk all day and I am always signed into my gmail account. This ends up forcing you to become an instant messager addict because the people you email that have gmail automatically appear in an instant messaging window. Anyways, this is relevant to my post because in a way gchat is responsible for getting me to Ecuador. You can personalize your status on gchat and I had written "I need a vacation" and my friend Grayden saw this and invited me to go to Ecuador with him and our friend Reed. I don't think he thought that I would take it seriously since I do have a full-time job and they were leaving in two weeks. But I took it very seriously and by the end of the day I had talked to my boss and decided that I was going to go. It was just what I needed, even though it was too short (I was only there for five days) it satiated my need to flee that I tend to feel every six months and allowed me to spend time doing things that I love with fun friends in Latin America where I really wish I could spend more time.
Our first day in Banos we rented bikes, and when you pay five dollars for an all day mountain bike rental you should probably know that you shouldn't expect too high of quality. We attempted to finish a sixty kilometer ride from Banos to Puyo. Which may have been possible, but we were too easily distracted by cable cars that you ride on like a zip line from one side of the river to the other, waterfalls, rainstorms, and riverside cafes. Not to mention our bike equipment that was definetly subpar, half the time somebody was either unable to shift gears, our chain had fallen off, or the gear pad was almost completely worn down (which is definitely sketchy on a mostly downhill road shared with blind corners that your sharing with buses and trucks driving Latin America style). But the ride was beautiful as we started in Banos, which is a village nestled below a volcano in the Andes, and as we descend thousands of feet towards Puyo you can literally see the change in the vegetation as we moved from the tropical high lands to the Amazon rain forst basin.

The next day we had planned to go river rafting, but it had been raining for thirty straight hours and the roads were a mess. There were landslides and rockslides covering all the roads out of the city and the water was so high, so they canceled our river trip. So I spent the morning getting a massage while the boys worked on getting a fire started in our fireplace. In the afternoon we visited the local Catholic church which is covered in murals depicting miracles that happened to people in Banos from saving men who were walking across bridges that collapsed to saving villages from volcano eruptions thanks to the Virgin Mary.
Our last day the rain stopped and we were able to do our rafting trip. This picture doesn't really do the river justice (the rapids were pretty large with consistent class 3 and 4 rapids) but you can see that it looks like the chocolate river in Willy Wonka. The water is silty from all the volcanic sediment in the water. And as we were rafting we could hear landslides all around us. We were lucky/unlucky enough to be on a trip with a bunch of drunk Russians which provided us with plenty of entertainment as we watched them struggle to paddle our boat. When our boat capsized and Grayden and I were pulled downstream the Russian boat rescued us and pulled us in. And as they chanted in Russian we can smell the alcohol with every stroke. And the kicked was that our rafting tour started at 8:30 in the morning.