I’m going to merge Days 11 and 12 for this one because, quite honestly, I’ve been trying to play catch up with these blogs for a few hours now and Day 11 was full of our 8 hour canoe ride!
We all piled into our canoes for our full-day ride right after breakfast. My canoe had Mark, James, Christian, Alex, Meg and I. We weren’t more than 40 minutes out before the president, who was directing the motor of the canoe, started speaking in Spanish saying we had to abandon ship because our motor was broken!! Apparently, I have absolutely awful canoe luck! All six of us squeezed into two other canoes until lunchtime. 3 hours in, I was woken up by my boatmates saying our rudder was broken! Thankfully, this proved to be an easy fix.
After we had finished our lunches, Ellie told us we would have to wait for the president to come back with the fixed motor because it was dangerous for him to be driving alone all day without food should something happen, so we all took a nice swim in the river. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you what happened in the next four hours besides getting completely roasted by the sun. I woke up completely surprised that we had arrived already!
Back at Iyarina, after our 1.5-hour bus ride, I took the best shower of my life. I have never had a cold shower feel so good. I watched all of the river sediment fall on the floor and finally felt clean again.
The next day on 5/21 we got our pots back! The locals taught us how they construct paint brushes and use different types of mud to paint their creations. They cut a piece of Shirley’s hair to create our brushes and completely outperformed our silly paintings with their intricate designs. Afterwards, everyone began stressing about our assignments due tomorrow until we decided to canoe into a nearby town. It immediately started downpouring and the last thing I wanted to do was get into another canoe, but, thankfully, this canoe had seats AND a tarp roof.
The town we went into was definitely constructed to cater to tourists, but in a more secluded area. There were monkeys and dogs everywhere! We all bought some snacks and ended up going to a Mexican pizza place where we waited for our pizza so long, we almost didn’t make the boat ride back!
The views on the ride back were unreal. The sun doesn’t set very dramatically here because we are right on the Equator, but as the day turned to dusk, purple and yellow painted the sky and mist clouded the mountains. I could have sat in that boat for hours with that view.
After dinner, Carter finally ran a Zumba class!! Shirley, Meg, Rohan, Christian and I were absolutely drenched in sweat by the end, but we all agreed to attend Carter’s Zumba classes at Pitt next year! Tomorrow is definitely going to be a workday for all of the assignments we have to get done. I hope I’m not sore from Zumba!