Olivia’s Travel Tips: DO: continue to wear bug spray, because bug bites still suck even if you are immune to Yellow Fever. DON’T: even think about eating chicken feet.
Yesterday we went on a little adventure to one of the most idyllic places I have ever been in my whole entire life. (Excuse the excessive use of hyperbole please). After school, Me, Jeff, Agnes, and Phoebe met Kelsey, Jessie, Jeremy, and his friend Sacia at the bus station in Puyo to start our journey to a river town called Piatua. I hadn’t been told much about this river except that I was surely going to love it, so my expectations weren’t that high when we got off the bus at a pretty non-descript stretch of highway. But then, we took a little path off the highway and the river was revealed! It was wide and fairly shallow at this point, and spotted with rocks of all different sizes and shapes throughout. It was surrounded by trees that provided some spots with welcome shade, but also allowed the sun to turn some of the rocks into frying pans.
We walked over a bridge of questionable structural integrity (that seems to be a theme here, doesn’t it?) and continued walking alongside the river in search of the perfect spot. Because August is a pretty festive month, apparently a lot of people just take every Friday off, despite there being no official holiday. On this particular day, it seemed that other people had had the same idea as us. Ecuadorian families had each staked out their own sandy beach, woodsy grilling site, or bed of flat rocks to sun on, so we had to walk for a couple of minutes to find somewhere to set up our little camp. Finally, we found a huge rock in the middle of the river that seemed appropriate. The thing was, we had to bring all of our things across about 10 feet of river that was about 4 feet deep and had a pretty fast current. I was having some major Oregon Trail flashbacks, only instead of protecting the bags of wheat and salted mean, we were holding aloft our iPods and cameras. After this (somewhat) harrowing forging of the river, we all laid out our towels and began our day of relaxation.
We spent the day exploring the rocky shores of the river, allowing ourselves to be carried by the currents, swimming around, eating, and drinking. It was wonderful. At one point a couple of us trekked about 5 minutes upriver to a deeper part of the river that has a bridge above it from which hangs an excellent rope swing. I was feeling pretty intrepid as I descended the steep banks of the river to scale the rock that served as the platform for the swing. Since noone else was actually using the swing at the time, we gathered quite an audience whilst swimming over to it. Feeling pretty cool, we began our ascent of the rock, made it about 2 feet, and fell back into the water. Shit, the Ecuadorians did not approve. After a couple more attempts, and finally some assistance from Jeremy, we made it up on the rock and did some crowd-pleasing swings into the river. Redemption! Or so I thought. The next wave of embarrassment came when a girl who looked like she was about 10 years old casually sauntered up to the rock, placed her hands on it, and basically apparated to the top of it. Whatever, I didn’t even want to do that…
After a day of perching on the rocks, we walked about minutes upriver to this clearing area with cabanas and a volleyball and soccer court. It had a very beachy feel to it-I was getting some very "Rocket Power characters turn 21 and Hispanic" vibes from it. Very cool.
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