the love of adventure: 2 month marker!

Can you believe it! I've been here for 2 months! It has flown by and I don't want the rest of it to fly by too fast!! Some of the North Park group is leaving in a few weeks so that will be sad...but other groups will be coming in and out of CEDEI. We went to Giron this past weekend and it was an adventure. Evertime they tell us that we are going on a hike we never can be too sure what to expect! Sometimes the hike is literally a walk around some old inca ruins that required no level of cardio vascular fitness what-so-ever...other times a "fifteen minute" hike through the jungle turned out to be a mud slide for your life..! haha The hike through the jungle was very difficult probably because of the mud, humidity and exceptionally steep slopes that we attempted to make our way up in the galoshes that were provided...(like rainboots.) Giron was more comparable to the jungle hike we had in Cotacocha. I was expected again a "fifteen minute hike" like they mentioned to us before and we hike up some carved out stairs...no big deal..than it started to get a little more damp. There was a beautiful waterfall that we were hiking to and the water at times streamed into our path. We made it to the top not a challenging task at all and we found a small bridge going right in front of the waterfall and the mist and wind from the cascada was incredible! We walked over the bridge and there was a brilliant rainbow right before our eyes! No picture or description can capture that moment. We separated into 2 groups on the way back down. The group that didn't want to go through the jungle and the group that did! Of course I went with the jungle crew...not to mention that I wasn't thinking that we would be tromping through any mud and had decided to wear little sandals..hahah luckily they had straps on the heel. We were hiking through sinking sand mud, walking though streams, slipping down wet mossy rocks and just havin a grand ol time.
We made it down with mud everywhere. A lot of the group fell in the mud and we all got soaked from the waterfall mist. It was more like a hose than a mist...haha

We stopped at some old battle field where Ecuador had won its independence before that and to a little museum explaining the different important military leaders...anyways
Than we had a wonderful coordinator set up our day to stop at this resort type place and go swim for the day! We payed to get in but got to use their pools in the middle of a valley overlooking the mountains. The weather was perfect and it was nice and hot. The pool water was perfectly refreshing and they also had 2 waterslides!! haha Now these are what we call Ecuadorian waterslides.Long story short..the slides look like normal water slides but the water running down one of them was by a simple hose..and not only a hose but to start the water flow onto the slide most times a little boy would come over and suck on the hose to syphon the water from the other pool of water in the adjacent slide....hahahah
My group didn't understand why he was sucking on the hose so I jumped in and did it as well after the boy had left and there was no water flowing.. I guess they didn't know what syphoning was! haha it was pretty ghetto but great. The slide of death that was a pretty fast had two injuries in our group. Bianca smacked her head so hard in the middle of the ride that when she came up grasping her head and talking about having a concussion..others were definitely deterred. Linley a sweetheart hit her tail bone really bad at the end of the ride and ended up causing her to have a previous injury flare up even worse...But all in all I guess you know that you're having fun when people are getting hurt...right?....haha or you just know that you are in Ecuador ..on makeshift waterslides..hahha

My pics are from when we had a baking party and than a birthday surprise for our coordinator Lisa! We made delicious desserts..described in a previous blog..