After an amazing trip to the deep amazon, Daylin and i headed to another town in the amazon called Tena. Tena is known to be the number one spot in Ecuador for white water rafting, because of its proximity to the Napo river. Out hostal duena put us in touch with her nephew who ran a raftingagency and we met up with the rest of the rafters early friday morning. Luckily, only two other girls were on our trip, making our first experience rafting very intimate.

I was raining that morning, and we were riding in the back of a pick-up truck to the river all four of us shivering. When we got to the river, we helped with the set up and got to know our crazy guide Tarquino. We did a few safety drills on how to rescue a person in they were to fall out of the baot and then started paddling down the river. We were going down rapids and next thing we knew, our guide was using his paddle to push us off the boat. This would be something to expect throughout the day, and a couple of times towards the end, he flipped the whole boat over, leaving us all to float. One time, i fell out of the boat while in a rapid, causing wave after wave to crash on me, but all i could do was laugh.

We stopped at the river bank and Tarquino returned with a fruit in his hand called achote used in the area as food coloring. He painted each of our faces with the bright orange paste before we got back on our boat. Later, after we stopped or lunch, he took us up to a canyon with trees lining the edges and little caves going off in each corner and a river flowing through. There, he broke open these orange rocks and inside there was a light gray clay which he put on our faces and the orange paste from the rock in our hair. Once we washed the clay masks off, we got back on the boat for the last time.

We paddled through a few rapids, and Tarquino told us to jump out since these were rapids quiet enough to swim in. Eventually, all four of us girls were getting carried away by the current, but all of a suddeni got pushed away from the current and found myself sucked into a wirlpool, pulling me deep into the water but i was lucky i had my lifejacket on. The saftety kayaker had to help me get closer to the boat but eventually i got back on just fine. A few minutes after that, we reached the end and we packed up and rode back to the hostal, soaked, on the back of the pick-up.
Posted from Ecuador:

posted Sunday August 2006