Happy 4th of July!

I am writing this blog from Cartagena, Colombia where Chris and I are spending the holiday with two Brits. Chris told them they should be excited to celebrate the American holiday where we celebrate being free of their tyranny. They didn’t seem that excited and claimed they would sit on the balcony drinking tea all day long in protest. We are currently planning a mini Boston Tea Party for their bathtub in retaliation. Just kidding.

We are staying in an apartment with Antony and Lisa from Leeds, England. We met them in Ushuaia, Argentina at the beginning of our trip and have managed to meet up in Lake Titicaca, Cusco, and Quito. They are at the end of their year long around the world trip and booked this apartment in Cartagena for two weeks before they fly home. Chris and I are tagging along.

We survived the jungle. Chris promised he would write a blog but he never finished it and now he will be mad that I’m pointing this out on the blog. The jungle was fine. The best part was Pancho the monkey. Pancho is a nine month old Wooly Monkey and her mother was killed by poachers when Pancho was very young. One of the rangers found her and brought her to the lodge where we were staying. So now they have a naughty, but very cute, baby monkey causing all sorts of trouble and amusement. Monkeys are great entertainment, kind of like having a small stupid child that can climb and dangle and hop onto the table and steal your food in about 2 seconds.

We saw a big anaconda, lots of wild monkeys, birds, big scary spiders and bugs, and I managed to walk around with a tick under my arm for about 2 days. When we got back, and I could finally take a hot shower that wasn’t river water, I discovered it and had to pull it off. Yuck. Chris escaped parasite free.

I uploaded the remaining photos from the Galapagos and the jungle, but I am having trouble with our photos page on the website. The photos are posted on my public photo page so if you click here and here, you can see them. Or you can just click on the My Public Gallery tab at the top of the page and see all of the pictures.

When we returned to Quito we visited the site of the equator with two other girls from the jungle trip. In the 1700’s the French came and determined the exact spot where the equator was and they built a monument. It turns out they were about 150 meters off and the local people had already found the spot about 900 years earlier. Fast forward to GPS days and they built another museum on that equator spot… although they may be a bit off as well. But we went to both monuments and had fun in the museum and then traveled back to Quito. Click here to see those pictures.

On Tuesday we flew to Colombia. Cartagena is the top tourist destination and so far, we’re not sure why. We need to get into the old city and see some of the beaches farther out of town because the ones close to us are pretty dirty and polluted. Cartagena was the main export point for all of the gold to return to Europe. It was built in the 1500’s and the colonial city is supposed to be very cool. We are also on the Caribbean so we want to get to the better beaches to see the white sand and blue water.

So for now, Chris and I are in Cartagena for one week, maybe two, and then we are off to somewhere else in Colombia or Brazil, depending on flights. We leave at the end of the month so time is running out. Happy 4th!

Welcome to the Jungle

It's late and I am beyond frustrated with computers at the moment. Nothing is working and everything is so slllllllooooooooowwwwwww, I want to pitch this computer through a window. But, I wanted to let you know that the majority of our Galapagos pictures are up. When the wifi decides to cooperate, the rest will be up. I wanted to at least put something on there.

Otherwise, things are fine. We arrived to Quito today and met up with this girl Mel that we went on the Galapagos cruise with. She had already done some ground work on trips into the jungle so tomorrow night we take an overnight bus into the hot, humid, bug infested jungle. We are doing a five day trip and staying in a lodge. There will be day hikes, boat trips, meeting with local people, and pirhana fishing. Yikes. Hopefully nothing swims up our pee holes in the river.

But I (or Chris) will write more before we leave, and hopefully tomorrow we can get the rest of the photos sorted. Now, I'm sleepy and I have a trashy book to finish.

Sacajawea and Disrespecting the Jungle

Today we leave for the Galapagos. It should be a great time on an 8 day cruise. Before we go I just wanted to write a few things more about Ecuador as I'm not sure if we will have internet access on the boat.

First of all, as Stefani has already mentioned, Ecuador seems to be the most Americanized country we have visited so far. The first noticeable instance of this is the fact that they use the US dollar as their currency. Like every country we've been in down here, they still have trouble making change for almost any purchase you make. Normally you might think you could give someone a 10 for something that cost a few dollars and everything would be ok. That's not the case here. If you did that here, you would wait for a long time while the clerk talked to everyone around to see if they had any change and eventually, after confirming that no one had change, they would leave to go get change somewhere else. When they finally returned you would get a handful of change in coins. The most common of which here are 50 cent pieces and Sacajawea dollar coins. You probably remember the short lived Sacajawea coins in the US. They were everywhere for about 3 days several years ago. I still get them from stamp machines at the post office, but I always wondered what happened to all of them. Now I know. They were all shipped down to Ecuador. I can see this deal going down. "OK we'll pay you an extra half a cent per kilo of bananas so that you can afford to buy shoes and feed your children, but we will have to pay you in Sacajawea coins. Take it or leave it."

Another instance of Americanization here is related to the Coriolis effect. Everywhere in South America, water has swirled clockwise as it drained from sinks as opposed to the normal American way of counterclockwise. Here in Guayaquil, however, we are still in the southern hemisphere and the water is swirling counterclockwise, as it would in the northern hemisphere. Some of you out there might be thinking, isn't this guy supposed to be an ocean engineer. Doesn't he know that the Coriolis force is so small that it doesn't really effect the way water flows out of a sink. That may be so, but here in Guayaquil the myth of Coriolis is alive and well, and it is effecting the way water drains from the sinks in Hotel Ecuador.

I'm running out of time and battery juice for my computer so I just want to leave you with a story about dirty hippies and the jungle. I hope to go into the jungle from Quito after we return from the Galapagos. There are several places that offer 4 or 5 day trips where you travel first by plane and then by boat to lodges in the Amazon. Depending on where you go, you spend time checking out the wildlife, going on hikes through the jungle and possibly meeting some of the indigenous people that still live out there. While we were in Nazca, Peru there was a dirty hippy talking on the phone presumably to a travel agent of some sort. The guy was wearing pink long johns and a flannel shirt and looked like he hadn't bathed in a while even though he was staying in a hotel that had showers. Based on what I overheard of his phone conversation, I'm guessing that he hadn't showered because he didn't want to disrespect the desert by using it's water. Basically, he was telling the person on the other side of the phone conversation that he wanted to go to the jungle, but that it was extremely important that he not enter the jungle via airplane for spiritual purposes. At least three times he said something along the lines of, "it would just be so disrespectful to enter by plane. I really need to enter the jungle by boat. Do you understand?" You probably had to be there to truly appreciate what a piece of work this guy was, but hopefully you get some understanding from what is written here. I mean...to each his own, but this guy was a turd.

Right now I'm going to go disrespect the Galapagos by flying to the islands and then cruising around in a fuel burning motor boat.