La Selva... The Jungle

Five days in the Jungle... It's too much to tell without it turning into a thesis (hows that coming, Pete?)

But the highlights are:

- The jungle is incredibly loud. The animals, especially at night, are going crazy. It's noisier than Times Square, hands down. It's noisier than in 2007 when DeRosa stepped up to the plate with two men on, one out, in Game 3 of the Cubs' short playoff run. (He hit into a double play. Sigh.)

- The jungle is incredibly dense. It sounds obvious, and I guess it is, but up close and personal it's unbelievable. When walking through the jungle, I couldn't see more than 15 feet side to side because of all the trees, plants, roots, vines, bushes, leaves... it's endless, and at the same time, overwhelmingly close.

- Animals are cool! We saw a bunch of different types of monkeys, including the Howler Monkeys, who make a terrifying sound. They sound like a pack of lions, but like, zombie lions. Crazy. We saw a tarantula. Friggin' gigantic. Heavens to Betsy. The thing was the size of my stretched hand (normal hand, not carnie small chubby hands). I could see it's eyes gleaming in the flashlight (we saw it on a night-hike, which made it all the more awesome/terrifying). I felt like it's pinsers were beckoning me. (Side note - there are certain scars that I think are sweet because of the story behind them - two good ones would be from a taratula, or a piranah. I don't have either, don't fret.) We saw four different types of ants - Lemon ants (who's bums taste like lemon, teehee), Leaf-cutter ants (who can be seen carrying pieces of leaves twenty times their size), Fire ants (who hurt like hell if they bite you. They protect the tree in which they live... it's like they have a deal with the tree), and the Bull ant (which is half the size of my thumb. oh em gee). We saw a wasp nest which was more interesting than usual as these wasps have an interesting self-defense mechanism (outside their stinger) - when they are in fear, say after our guide yelling really loudly at them, they all vibrate their torsos. The resulting phenomenon is that, all together, they sound like a marching army. It's the most bizarre thing.

- I and Kristen ate a beetle larvae! Delicious. The full grown beetle lays an egg or two eggs in a seed of a tree. The seed is about the size of an oval tennis ball. Then, using a machete (oh yeah) you hack it open, and inside is this little white larvae. When I bit it, it exploded in my mouth, quite a funny sensation. But it tasted really good! I found it tasted quite like coconut, whereas Kristen's only had a faint trace of coconut (damn larvae, jipped her). And then you swallow it. Very Survivor.

- We went fishing for piranahs! But I caught a catfish! Fail and success!

- We saw river dolphins!

- We were in the Cuyabena reserve, in the middle of nowhere. Well, the 'middle of nowhere' is NYC compared to this. This place is 17 hours by bus, bus and boat from Quito. It felt like we were the only humans there.

That's a quick run down - I'll post more with pictures and videos when I get around to uploading them!

Thanks for reading!