Location: Quito
After an eventful July 25 and very late night, we were all fortunately granted an extra couple of hours of sleep before waking up at 8:30 am to do some last minute packing. After breakfast and announcements, we said goodbye to our home for the past week and boarded a bus to head to the San Cristobal airport, where we boarded a flight to begin our journey to the Amazon… We arrived at the lodge an hour outside of Coca, Ecuador and to our surprise found no giant spiders or dangerous snakes in sight, until the day took a turn for the worse. We were greeted by an aggressive jaguar who began to stalk us and minute by minute the situation became more and more volatile until it pounced. Luckily this creature was only interested in the bag of snacks, which was being held by a fellow student. The student escaped remarkably unscathed, however, we weren’t out of the woods yet as a poisonous snake who’s preference was to remain unnamed started to slither faster and faster towards us. At this point, we decided that we’d had enough and started belting towards our new home in the Amazon. Suddenly I woke up from this crazy dream and realized that, fortunately, this wasn’t the case and instead our day was spent on a plane and a bus back to the same hotel in Quito as day 1 to prepare for an unholy wake-up time to begin our real journey to the Amazon. More on that tomorrow…