We woke up early this morning at the break of dawn to the sound of howler monkeys just outside in the rainforest surrounding our cabina. The cicadas here are so loud that I couldn’t hear myself think when laying in bed last night and the toucans sing like there’s no tomorrow. Although it was enough to wake me, it was strangely comforting to hear the sounds of nature just outside our door.
While Jason showered, I changed and mixed up my lavender & tea tree bug spray concoction that I made from our first aid kit because out here the bugs are large & in charge. We walked our electronics up the hill to the kitchen to check emails & charge whatever needed a battery boost because we don’t have electricity in our bamboo room. We had coffee, fruit & yogurt, and scrambled eggs, all prepared by Ana and all delicious.
After sitting around and talking, asking about our [hopefully] future urban garden on our [hopefully] porch in our nonexistent DC apartment, we put on our rubber boots and Ian, Ana, their farmhand Derek, Jason & I all headed out into the rainforest to check out the river and set out a trap for prawns & crawfish. The river, it turns out, was so low, because they’ve been experiencing a drought, that there were no spots deep enough to place the trap or where the raccoons hadn’t already fished all the goods out.
But it was really fun, despite waterlogged boots and almost getting my face caught in a spider web [ok, a few spider webs] where a giant spider was sleeping. We saw a lot of flora and got a nice hike in. We came back to eat lunch of veggie crepes & salad, while watching howler monkeys come into the area above the path we used. Apparently they had followed us in, so we were able to watch them eat right above us along with toucans sitting in the next tree over, which was just so cool.
We took a little siesta after lunch and I finished my book, which makes that number 3 in 3 weeks [one goal of this trip was to read one book every week]. Its been a quiet evening so far while Ana makes pizza for dinner. But I’m sure there’s more jungle music to come to lull us back to sleep tonight.
[PS– The internet up here is super slow so uploading pictures to CyC has been like pulling hair. So, with that said, I’ll be uploading some soon when I have more time to let it do its thing!]
