Sunday, June 16, 2013
*these are slightly edited journal entries from our time with a tribe in the Amazon (6/16-20/2013) – so that’s why they are posted after the fact and in present tense. This was my first jungle trip! Loved it! We had so many stories from the trip that I decided to post a series of blog posts from my journal, of which this is the first. I hope you enjoy getting a more detailed, up-close glimpse into some of our adventures with this tribe – I know I did! Thanks for your prayers!
after 12 hours on the river, it started getting dark and we still had 3 hours to
go. Tom, our team leader, tried to talk our driver into continuing up the river
in the dark until we reached the village, but after hitting one log in the dark,
our driver put his foot down and started looking for a place to pull over for
the night. Long story short, we stopped at a hut/house on the river bank and
asked to stay the night. Thankfully, the family agreed.
The hut/house was a multi-level, multi-room, side-less,
stilt house with about 10 pigs – make that 10 squealing pigs J - below the floor boards. We grabbed our tents & put
them up in one of the larger rooms. It was already pretty dark so we didn’t
waste much time outside, chillin’ with the mosquitos – we climbed into our tents
and slept in our clothes.
of our driver calling, “vamos!” & revving the boat engine. We all scrambled
to get our tents packed in record time. Oh and just as a side story, come to
find out, (remember this house/hut was on stilts, so it was a good distance from
the ground) not all the planks on the floor were all that trustworthy… Haha,
this led to a series of events where at least three of us almost fell through
the floor, as planks gave way as we sleepily ran to catch our boat. (Apparently,
the family that lived there knew what planks in their house not
to step on…our gringo team, on the other hand, didn’t). Very humorous in
hindsight, but at the time resulted in one of the guys nearly getting knocked out
when he stepped on one end of a plank, only to have the other end come up and
nail him in the side of the head. Ouch! Yup, we are definitely
gringos…