Jungle trip with mac

So i arrived monday into quito after a painful 19 hours of traveling from dc to quito. To get the cheapest ticket possible I agreed to spend the night at miami airport and had the painful experience of trying to sleep in the miami airport. Which really doesnt work that well considering there are security announcements about every 15 minutes and they ran the floorwaxers by my head the whole time i tried to sleep.

I arrived into quito, dropped off all my excess stuff with the family i am staying with and then went on to find my buddy at our hostel in the new area of quito. tuesday morning we took off on a bus to banos which was pretty uneventful relative to our return trip.

the bus ride from quito to banos has some beautiful scenery of the surrounding mountains and volcanoes and the country side, but you also seethe poverty and just plan crappyness of the towns and countrysides out in the rural areas.

Below is a photo of a view in the city of banos i took. It includes a church there, some of the plaze and part of the mountain behind we hiked up.

We were able to get a pretty amazing room at a hostel for 6$ a night each and we went off to book our jungle trip. This is actually a photo of banos that I took off the roof of our hostel - the room had deck chairs and also a frige where you could get oversized beers:

the first company we checked out was pretty sketchy. there were three guys sitting on a couch watching tv, pretty obviusly high and they gave us a presentation on the jungle trip that they offered into the jungle with visual aids made with large pieces of paper and magic markers.

the second place was a little bit more reputable it seemed and we booked a trip. we spent that afternoon hiking up about 3000 feet on a mountain surrounding banos that gave us a great view of the town sitting below the large active volcanoe that towers above it. i actually got some amazing photos on ashlees digital camera only i accidently deleted them at the end of the jungle trip so i have nothing to post now. however here is a photo i pulled off the net of banos that give you an idea of what it looks like

That evening we also went to the hot springs in banos and bathed with the locals and then we took off the following morning on our jungle trip. It actually included a short downhill bike from banos towards puyos and then we went white water rafting for 2 hours on the pastanza river which flows from banos down towards puyo and eventually empties in to the amazon. I had some pretty amazing photos which were also acciedently deleted but here is a shot i found on the net of the rivere were on:

we took a short bus ride to puyo and then a short car trip to the site where our jungle stuff was based. I ll update this shortly when i can gain access to a computer to upload some images of the area. otherwise, all is going well, i{m in quito, getting ready to start working in clinics and hospitals and am healthy. my buddy took off to hike macchu pichu today and except for a mild hangover i am well.