That's a Wrap!

Hello everyone! Well by now I've been back in the States for about a week. I thought I'd take the time to briefly fill you all in on my last few weeks in Ecuador.

A few days after getting back from the Galapagos, I took a spur-of-the-moment trip with two friends to a place called Baños, which has a ton of cool adventuring opportunities. When we got there, we met up with a 4th guy and his brother. Together, the 5 of us went white-water rafting on a class 4+ river. It was really fun and I fell out of the boat once. That was a rush. Half-way down our trip, the guide pulled us over to a sand bar where we got out and were brought to a bridge that the guides estimated to be between 20 to 30 feet high. After taking a few practice jumps into the water below the bridge from lower heights, the guide took us up to the bridge, where we each took turns jumping off into the water below. IT WAS SO COOL!!! The only down side was that my velcro watch fell off when I hit the water and I couldn't find it, so from now on every morning at 8:15, the fish will be woken up to an under water alarm.

We finished up our rafting adventure and headed back to town. We were all pretty exhausted after our morning adventure, and were walking around the town aimlessly when several guys came up to us offering us a deal on bridge jumping. Now this bridge jumping wasn't the "wimpy" 30 feet that we had jumped that morning, no. This bridge was 300 feet above the water. 300 FEET!!! Of course we didn't jump without a harness and ropes, it wasn't bungee jumping, it was pendulum jumping, meaning the ropes had very little give to them, but were set up in such a way that when we fell to the end of the rope, we weren't whiplashed and instead swung a bunch under the bridge until we were let down. The actual fall lasted for about 200 feet. The most terrifying part was right before the jump. Everything seemed pretty scary, but manageable while standing on the bridge, but then we had to climb up the railing of the bridge and stand on a tiny platform. That was really freaky. To make it worse, we had to have our toes curled around the edge of the platform! The man would then grab our ankles and rest his head on our butt and counted uno, dos, tres, and then pulled our ankles while pushing with his head and that was that. The freefall lasted maybe 3 seconds. I didn't make a sound while falling, but as soon as I started my swinging, I was shouting out for excitement!

Other things accomplished in Baños included a relaxing evening at the natural hot springs/baths, which the town is named after, and also climbing part of a volcano.

I had the whole weekend to relax before setting off on my next adventure: my last week in Ecuador. I spent it with my buddy Zack. We visited two big cities in the South: Guayaquil and Cuenca. Guayaquil is the most populated and most modern city in Ecuador. It was very pretty, and Zack and I had fun doing touristy things and going to museums and a huge cemetary.

After a day and a half there, we got on a bus to Cuenca, which was my favorite city that I visited in Ecuador. It's full of really nice, old historic buildings that have nice little shops inside. Very recently, the whole city was cleaned up and now it's a very safe place with beautiful parks. I made sure to get a bunch of pictures of buildings and such from there. I'll post those when I can.

Tidbit: Long-distance bus rides in Ecuador are very cheap. If you want to know how much a bus ride will cost, a good estimate is about $1 per hour of bus riding. That's right, so the 10-hour bus ride returning us to Quito from Cuenca costs about 10 bucks. I wonder what that would have cost if we'd gone on Greyhound.

Leaving my house was very difficult, and it didn't help that I had stayed up all night packing before I left on Sunday morning. During breakfast, my host mom and I were choking back tears, reminding ourselves and each other that there was really nothing to be sad about; I'd had a wonderful time in Ecuador, formed a wonderful relationship with my host family, and decided that I would return some day to visit.

When I first got back to the States, there were several things that I had to get a little used to. The two biggest were getting used to flushing my toilet paper, and also talking to important, official people in English. I've found that I really enjoy both of those.

My first week back was spent in Savannah, Georgia with my bestest buddy Derik. I hadn't seen him in a long time, so it was great to have a week to catch up and hang out. As a little welcome back surprise, he took me to a comic convention in Orlando. We both had a blast! I got to talk to and get an autograph of my favorite comic book artist. It was SO COOL!!!

I am currently writing this blog post from the Charlotte/Douglas International Airport, where I got stuck on my way back to Cleveland due to less-than-desirable weather conditions. The good news is that my new flight is scheduled to take off now in an hour and a half, after my first over-night stay at an airport.

Well I think that just about does it for my Adventures in Ecuador blog. Overall it was a fantastic experience, I got everything that I wanted to out of it, and I look forward to returning to Ecuador at some point in the future.

I don't imagine there will be any more posts here, but please check up on my Picasa page in the near-ish future, as I plan on uploading more pictures.

Take good care, everyone.
Thanks for reading,
~Joey