Our day started off early with a daunting seven-hour bus ride to the Iyarina lodge, and a very stressful hour trying to get pre-sale tickets to the Lorde concert on spotty Ecuadorian wifi…spoiler alert…we got kicked off and couldn’t buy them. Shout out to Joshua Ezer for snagging my tickets on the New Jersey wifi!!!
Stepping onto the bus was almost relieving. We had been going so fast every day that sitting down with ample time to catch up on my blogs and rest was needed. However, with Skip and Rick they were full of surprise stops along the way – the first being to a solar museum. Although I didn’t necessarily understand everything the museum was meant to teach me, I had a lot of fun running around the equator!
The next surprise stop was the Cayambe National Park with BEAUTIFUL misty mountain views. The geography of Ecuador continues to take my breath away and leave me feeling like a speck of dust compared to the nature around me in the most wonderful way. We munched on Skip-approved, wild cranberries along the way and took some gorgeous pictures that will obviously never catch the full mountains’ essence.
My personal favorite stop was to the HOT SPRINGS!!! This was the bucket list item I never knew I had! I was actually giddie walking along the paths towards the springs. It was an out-of-body experience to be laying on rocks submerged in the hot water looking out onto the mountain landscape. Shirley led us to the FRIGID water claiming it helped our circulation to cycle back and forth…I think I lost circulation in my legs: it was SO cold.
Our fourth stop to the cloud forest unfortunately got postponed to Friday, because it ended up being so dark, but I was content just staring at the sky full of stars. Meg and I would both lean up against the window just to catch a glimpse. This was such a gift because it isn’t often that we stop and just look at our environment in awe. Life could be so much more magical if we allowed ourselves to romanticize it.
The Iyarina lodge greeted us with what felt like an endless stone path in between a treacherous foreign jungle surrounded by the darkness of night. I’ve always felt at home in the woods, but when we found two tarantulas in the first two hours, I realized this jungle wasn’t full of the typical Pennsylvania inhabitants. I nearly peeled my raincoat off my skin after dinner in an effort to keep the mosquitos off my arms. Thank god my room already had a full-sized canopy bug net ready for use! I’m excited to make pottery tomorrow!