Jeeeeez... third post in a day... yikes!

OK, so I feel like a) sitting in Quito deserves time spent in an internet café and warrants updates so that I don´t have to do it when I get home, b) it´d be weird to update my blog about my travels from Ontario, c) I may as well spend the next 1/2 here waiting for Shane since I´ve already been here for 4 hours...

So beyond just working at the reserve over the last three weeks I also decided to stick around on weekends and explore as much as possible of the 814 hectares. The first weekend consisted of playing soccer everyday with the locals and my dear friends, Dave, Bea, Meggy, and Kate (Marina didn´t play)- the girls being 15/17 year olds from Lakefield, Ontario and SUPER fabulous. As well as the soccer the four volunteers that stuck around (Shane, Dave, Rob, and I) headed down the hill Saturday morning with donkey and while Shane and Rob headed into Tandapi to do a little grocery shopping, Dave and I ventured along a part of the cascade trail. It was beautiful, fun, and a little treacherous but totally worth it even though it was followed by the hiking back up the hill with donkey for lunch and then soccer in the afternoon. The boys did some garden work while I did some catch up on internet time and cleaning and then we had some good partying on the homemade moonshine aguardientes that Shane bought in town. This made Sunday morning a little rougher than I was hoping but I sweated out the alcohol on our 5 hour hike to the top of the mountain with Shane, Dave, and the Ontario girls... what a blast!

A blast until Jorgé insisted on more soccer once we got back down that is, lol...

The following weekend was another reserve weekend before my departure. Shane had to leave Thursday night to deal with some visa stuff Friday morning but we had a movie night and early bedtime... Friday was awesome. Those remaining people packed up our stuff and around lunchtime begain another trek to the top of the mountain, this time for a camping trip! So Rob, Simon, Dave, Escott, myself, Walter, and the 4 TVL Ontario girls (and Donkey) camped out, looked at birds, learned about low impact shitting in the forest, and played frisbee, cooked some dinner and chilled by the fire. It was a blast!
Saturday consisted of the frontier hike which was about 7 hours, treking through primary forest, heading down along the border of the reserve to the bottom of the mountain (yes that meant having to then walk back up the hill to the reserve). I don´t think that I have the skill to sufficiently describe how beautiful and surreal it is to walk through the jungle and I really don´t think that pictures are sufficiet either but I guess I´ll include some in hopes of inspiring people to see it for themselves. Saturday night was a quiet night as we were all wiped but I still had the pleasure of relaxing over a few beer with Dave and Scott for my final night. Sunday was also wonderful but bittersweet as I had to leave for Quito and then Papallacta (more hotsprings!)... hopefully people will appreciate why I love the reserve... and why I have to return :)

The RETURN... to La Hesperia

So Shane and I decided that we weren´t ready to leave La Hesperia and contacted Alexandra regarding a return trip. Upon hearing this she said that our project when we return would be to redo the vegetable garden as per our own suggestions when we left the first time.

This basically meant that we were going to tear up some weird fan shaped raised bed design that was extremely inefficient with space, difficult to care for, and unproductive, and convert the garden area to farm style rows... let the games begin!
What does this all mean, you might ask? Well, it means that we had to remove the wooden posts/walls of the raised beds, till the entire area, remove the grass and weeds that were inhabiting the area, rake the soil into raised rows, and plant some fooooood! That doesn´t sound so tough but let me say, when it´s all manual labour because things like rear-tine rototillers (spelling?) don´t exist here it´s a tough job, thankfully we had our fellow volunteers putting some serious sweat and elbow grease into it too (THANK YOU ALL!)

The result? It´s beautiful! Even though Shane and I ended up having to stay an extra week we were fortunate to have a wonderful man named Dave show up who is equally as passionate and hardworking and willing to take over the care of the garden for us while we´re gone... yay!

On top of the garden make-over, we were also given the responsibilities of creating a cow manure composter and a kitchen/greenwaste composter... easy peasy you say? Well let´s just say that these had to be large scale and low cost/ minimal material usual which resulted in us cutting each composter into two separate hillsides... it was actually quite a bit of fun and a bit of a bitch but they´re both mostly finished with the exception of their roofs (rooves?) which Dave had accepted responsibility for. Other than that we did some serious hiking which I will cover in mere moments in a separate post... imagine, no posts forever and then three in one day!

Baños... que linda!

So after Shane and I finally got back safe and sound from San Cristobal we spent two days in Quito where Shane could visit his woman (a drama in and of itself) and get some passport/visa stuff dealt with- or so we thought. On the Friday our friend Scott (aka Escott, Oskar, the Great Forest Escottie, etc) met us for breakie and joined us as we headed to the wee town of Baños in the Tungurahua region of Ecuador. One of the main reasons for the trip (besides the sheer joy of travelling) was to visit friends of ours that we met in Quito when we arrived in January, Chris and Conny, retired teachers from Guelph!

We had planned to visit Baños on two other occasions previously but things kept happening- such as landslides and volcanic eruptions- that got in the way but this time we were determined to meet up with them before they left the country. Emailing was difficult and we (somewhat reluctantly) trusted Shane´s communication and directional skills... let´s just say that there were a few snags, we didn´t actually know how to contact them or where in the town to find them beyond following some old place references from emails gone by. As we wandered the town, trying not to fight or kill each other, Escott offered efforts of tension breaking by saying that these people don´t actually exist and then complaining that we brought him to a place where there aren´t even any birds to look at...lol... sucker. So we grabbed lunch and wandered about some more... at this point I have to thank my mom and dad and ancestors for my height which turned out to be an advantage oddly enough.

So we were wandering the street that we suspected the school they were volunteering at was on and couldn´t figure out where it was until we walked past this big metal gate that had a little hole in it, just about at my eye level, for the lock... I looked to my left and low and behold I saw paintings and murals and toys and people! So we knocked and it turned out to be the art school that they worked at but they had not been there in several days, however, the lovely gentleman that we dealt with gave us directions to their place and a time to come back and check if they came by. Unfortunately, they weren´t at their place, nor were they there when we went back, but we did get a tour and some interesting info on the volunteer program that they were running there.

At a bit of a loss we headed to a nearby internet cafe and were checking to see if they´d sent word electronically when I turned to gaze out the door and saw them walking by!! So I turned to Shane and said ¨Chris and Conny just walked by¨, got up and bolted after them, stopping them in the street :) HAHA! So there Escott! They do exist! We chatted a bit, went back to get the boys, and headed to a nearby restaurant for beer and food... what a wonderful evening! We were all exhausted after though so it turned out to be an early bedtime for all with Scott wanting to get up early for bird watching and Shane wanting to get up early for hitting the local hotsprings (hence the name of the town, Baños means Baths), and me wanting to sleep in :) Shane succeeded in getting up early but got lost (as usual) and took a few hours to do his bathing and Scott failed at getting up with the birds but I got to sleep in and we all managed to meet for breakfast before deciding to head to the zoo (listed as the Animal Prison on the maps of the town). It seems that Shane´s directional issues rubbed off and we took a rather extended route to get to the zoo, however, we did get there, Scott got to see a bunch of caged birds, Shane and I ALMOST had a monkey throw shit at us but instead the little guy decided to eat his shit instead, and then we headed back to town to meet with Chris and Conny again for lunch... love those guys!

Other than the zoo and visiting with our Ontarian friends, we also got to see the venting of Vulcan Tungurahua, walk up the BAZILLION stairs and dirt path to the statue of the Virgin of whatever overlooking the town, and Scott and I got to see the beautiful paintings in the local church. Shane´s gf arrived Saturday which meant that Scott and I wandered about to give them some time alone, meeting up with them after dinner at a local pub boasting live local music... As for dinner, we had some delish pizza with a side of random band that walked in and set up in the middle of the tiny restaurant and played Andean music with a dancing chick! It was super cool... at least I thought so... funnily enough though, Scott and I ended up at a local bar after chilling with Shane and Geovanna that may as well have been somewhere in North America... but it was fun and had cold beer and a patio outside so I can´t complain...

Unfortunately, that pretty much sums up Baños since we didn´t do the bike into Puyo, any treks to the volcano, or dunebuggy-ing... but it was a good weekend and a nice trip to kick off the last leg of the big trip (before heading back to the reserve)...

Holy Crap a new post!!!!!

Yep, apologies, right from the get-go (or gecko if Kosta was reading this).

So... it´s been forever but I guess there´s probably quite a bit that I can breeze through so here´s a little overview and perhaps I´ll even be nice enough to break things into smaller pieces and add some photos, but that´ll have to be later since I am on the reserve computer which is a small step above dial-up.

Here GOES!!!...

So let´s go back a few weeks to Shane and I´s stay in the Galapagos. Lots of bugs, heat, humidity, and 18-20yr old volunteers and their ensuing drama which was more for entertainment I think than anything else. Now cut to the Monday before we were set to leave, we did our thing, worked, played/spectated music, hung out with our dear friends that we encountered at the reserve, and then decided that for our last night we were going to head to the ¨bar¨ which is in the middle of nowhere, frequented only by volunteers mainly, and completely open air... and a 10 minute walk from the reserve. Basically the bar sells Pilsener (the bigguns) for $2.50 (mainland is $1) and Rum only by the bottle for $14 including a 3L bottle of Coke or Sprite to mix. We started with the usual- beer- but were quickly convinced that the rum was a better deal by our friend Owen. This lead to the relatively small group of us (half dozen or so?) drinking 5 bottles of rum while chilling, dancing, chatting, and playing pool to the sound of someone´s iPod and hammering rain until the wee hours of the morning.
For me, the wee hours meant 4am ish at which point, despite Owen´s insistence that I´d get sick from the rain (um, helloooo, it´s HOT OUT) I trudged back on my own in a torrential downpour, later to be accepted as a monsoon. The trip back was quite exciting as my flashlight is terrible and I was drunk enough that my drunkenness lasted until dinner the following day... hence why I tend to stay away from RUM! Not only was the road super muddy but the two rivers that usually run under it by about 2m happened to be running OVER it by 2 feet... the second was a little nerve racking as I had to hold onto the bridge railing so as not to be swept away! (Yep, walking home alone was a GREAT idea) To keep things interesting there were also a few trees down across the road that I made note of as we were going to be needing to use that road to leave essentially later that same day. So I got back safe and sound... and very very wet... and waited for the guys in the kitchen for a bit. Coming to the conclusion that bed was a much better idea and the guys were not reliable in their departure time I ditched and had a little sleep.
7am came quite quickly and I woke up, as previously mentioned, still quite drunk. This was actually a blessing in disguise since it just so happens that between when I headed back from the bar at 4am and when the guys came back at 530am, there was a landslide that took down more trees and blocked the road. Why the heck would this be a blessing in disguise, you must be wondering... well, I had super (drunk) energy, patience, and optimism which was really useful when digging through literally TONNES of wet, heavy mud that we needed to move in order for the taxi to get through so we could get to Port.
With the help of pretty much everyone else, we managed to get enough of the road cleared only to find out that further down a large tree had fallen across it and the chainsaw needed to be employed to clear a path... THEN (yep, THEN!) when the guys went at lunch to cut the tree out of the way they realized that further down the road (duh duh duuuuhhhhhh... it´s a long road) THERE WAS NO ROAD! A sinkhole had developed and a rather sizeable portion of the road had disappeared... so what did we do? Well, we packed up our (super heavy) crap and prepared ourselves for the fact that we were going to have to carry it for about an hour´s hike to get to where the taxi could get to, HOWEVER, Erly... bestest taxi driver EVER... rebuilt the road on his way in and picked us up at the station! We quickly loaded the other departing volunteers, ourselves, and our crap, into the taxi (truck) and headed off before darkness fell with a couple of rough spots (such as having to get out of the taxi for the rebuilt sinkhole part and another fallen tree). Erly, being awesome, stopped the taxi when a new tree had fallen, hopped out, grabbed his machete, and cut the giant out of the way before getting us all safely to town.
Later we found out that the beach we were at a few days prior (nicest one on the island) was literally washed away, and landslides blocked the roads to other major beaches and surfing hangouts. Everyone seemed to be pretty good though and Shane and I were pretty happy to have a nice dinner and breakfast before heading back to the mainland.

We settled ourselves in our hostel and got some different things done Wednesday afternoon and had sushi dinner with Shane´s woman that night. Thursday was another errand day which included my getting my hair cut and coloured. The initial intention was a little trim and back to my regular dark brown but it seems that picking colours in a different language under red lights is not the best way of doing it so Í now blend a little better with the locals, sporting a nice raven black, rather than chocolate brown... ah well.. I can kinda pull it off I think! Friday we met Scott in the morning and grabbed breakfast before catching the bus to Baños which I think I´ll leave for another post that will come VERY soon... promise!

Hope life is good.. I´ll be back in the North soon and look forward to catching up oxoxx