Over the last 24 hours we have gone from being in the Amazon Rainforest, trudging up the Andes Mountains, and swimming in the Pacific Ocean on the West Coast. We started late Monday night into Tuesday morning sitting around the fire at Tod’s Lodge in the Amazon. We shared countless stories with each other of our favorite moments so far. My favorite moment still has to be meeting Kevin from the Waorani Tribe and still texting him today!
Tuesday morning we left the lodge about an hour later than expected to catch our flight. We were too busy enjoying some amazing Spagetti with steak bits. It sounds odd, but it was so good. We left a lot of time to still get to the airport on time, get checked in and eat. While going through the Andes Mountains, we were stopped dead in our tracks with another inconvenience: a landslide. The road was covered with mud, rocks, and even a tree. There was a mile long line on each side of cars waiting to pass through. It took a lot of shovels to change the water direction to stop the road from eroding, a guy with his car trying to make a path, and a massive bulldozer to finally clear it all off. After all of this we were cutting it close to making it to our flight after an hour of waiting on the landslide. With 5 minutes to spare we show up to the airport just for them to deny us and turn us away. We all grabbed something to eat and started a long journey ahead.
Skip, Rick, and Tod decided we should take a bus to the beach instead of waiting for the next flight. We all agreed without knowing how long it would really take. When someone asked we were told 10 hours! Nobody was happy after that. We left at 8:30 pm on Tuesday night from the airport to get to the beach. With only a few stops to use the bathroom and get gas, we finally arrived at 7:30 am Wednesday morning. That poor bus driver, 11 hours later he had to have been exhausted after driving almost 16 straight hours. We finally got here to an amazing resort and a great breakfast of eggs and toast.
We spent the morning doing a trash pickup to clear a few bottles off the beach just to give back to the Ecuador community. It was fun to do and it made the beach look even more amazing than it already was. Being beachfront, the sound of the waves is very relaxing and makes the massive haul from the Amazon to the West Coast so worth it. We then spent time at Machalilla National Park, hiking up to an astonishing outlook, swimming in the ocean, and riding waves. It was very refreshing to get to swim in the ocean and have some fun! (pic coming soon Skip)
