Alex's travel blog

Baños

I´ve done some fun things since the last blog entry - in fact I probably had my 3 most enjoyable days so far. They were:

Saturday. All the volunteers went for a walk in the forest and went in a bat cave! Well, it wasn´t strictly a cave, more like a ravine or fissure in the rock. To get in one had to crawl on hands and knees through a really muddy pool, then squeeze along between the rock faces. This bit was so narrow that even I could only just get through. There were hundreds of bats inside, and with all the screaming (not due to me) they were flying around and coming so close they brushed against our heads!

Sunday. Five of us went white water rafting. It was amazing! I´m proud to say that I sort of didn´t fall in. Well, I didn´t get thrown in by the water, but did get pushed in by our guide many times. He did evil things like when a person leaned out to pull someone back into the boat, he pushed that person in as well! After having this sort of thing for a couple of hours, we really shouldn´t have fell for any more tricks, but of course we did. For example, he got us to all stand round the edge of the raft linking hands, then leaning in and out. Of course, on one of the leanings out, he let go of our hands. We also did some crazy stuff like deliberately tipping the raft over and putting one raft on top of the other.

Wednesday. I went to somewhere called AmaZOOnico. Despite the cheesy name, it´s not really a zoo, more an amimal rehabilitation centre. It takes in animals from the police, who´ve seized them from illegal poachers, and also from local tribes, who´ve killed some animals and left their babies defenceless. About 10% die in the first week, about a quarter can be released back into the wild and the rest are either too ill, or too used to humans to be released, so they´re kept. I saw loads of cool things: toucans, parrots, turtles, wildcats and snakes. There were loads of tame monkeys running around the place, some of which try to jump on you. The best things were these enourmous rodents - the biggest species in the world - which looked like a giant rat/guinea pig and were about the size of a pig. The whole experience was made more exciting by the fact we needed to take a canoe down the river to get there.

As well as all this, I achieved my dream of planting some trees on Monday. It wasn´t really what you´d call reforestation, unfortunately, more just planting a line of trees around a school. And inexplicably, quite a few trees were cut down to make way for the new ones. There was a net gain in the number of trees, though. On Tuesday I did one of the most disgusting things I´ve ever done: mixing up the compost. The smell was absolutely unbearable and impossible to describe in words...but to get an idea, imagine all the food waste that would get thrown out from a kitchen, and imagine the smell after it´s been decomposing for a few months.

I´ve taking Friday, Saturday and Sunday off this weekend and am visiting Baños. It´s a small town in the foothills of the Andes. It´s very beautiful - surrounded by wooded mountains, with a waterfall cascading down one of the hills. Yesterday we did this cool downhill bike ride with great views (which was a bit slower than it might have been - some of our group clearly didn´t know how to ride a bike). Today we bathed in the baths fed by hot springs, which the town is named after (Baños means Baths in Spanish...I think). The best thing, however, has been the hot showers! You don´t know how good they are unless you´ve been taking cold showers or weeks. It´s also been great escaping the insect bites and the humidity...and yet I´m looking forward to getting back to Jatun Sacha later today...I guess it´s started to feel like home for me.