Tena Trip

                                                                          Tena Trip

                                                                                    

When I arrived in Tena my first sensation was the heat. It was blistering hot, and arguably the most humid place I’d ever been.  Our bus driver dropped us off in the middle of town, so we hailed a taxi to our hostel. The hostel was unreal, a combination of jungle and mountains and made entirely out of wood. The partial owner was from Colorado. That was nice because everyone had been speaking Spanish to me for three weeks, and it was a nice break to hear English. We got set up in our room and went into town to check it out. We went to a place called Café Tortuga to relearn how to play checkers and have some amazing food. Close to the cafe there was a lighthouse kind of structure that we climbed and the view was amazing. When you looked out you saw two rivers merging together in the middle of town (where we were). All of the landscape around the town was mountains with every inch of them covered in dense jungle trees. 

                          

Our room in Hostal Pakay

Tena Malecón 

Shortly thereafter, I smashed my newly earned phone’s screen pretty badly: like a spider web that covered the whole screen. The phone still worked perfectly fine, but it didn’t feel like it. So here’s the deal: I’d wanted that phone for 7 years, I’d started using it a week before, and this was the first time I’d brought it out into public. So to have smashed it …… that was really sad …… but there was hope! The woman from Colorado told me that phone repair was super cheap in Tena, and that I could fix it for not that much money. So with that knowledge I went to town with my dad, only to find out that it was Sunday and of course in South America NOTHING is open on Sunday. We walked around tena for 30 minutes to get takeout pizza. The town of Tena is beautiful. There’re endless shops on the sides of the streets varying from restaurants to repair shops. All of the shops are kind of “hole in the wall” which is really cool to look at. The thing was that none of them were open. So the next day my mom and I went to town to do 4 things in 2 hours: fix my phone, print the 23 pages for my algebra class, buy a bus ticket out of there, and get some food for dinner. But there was a problem. My mom and I had forgotten the password to my account to my algebra homepage, so after trying for 45 minutes, and 12 calls to my dad’s dead phone, we went to the terminal, the phone place, and the store. My dad finally called back and told us the password, so we went back and printed all of the pages for $1.25. 

When we got back and were eating dinner, I asked what we were doing the next day. Mom responded with “rafting” and I started to get excited. Rafting in Tena was supposed to be EPIC: class 4 with HUGE waves and a lot of really cool tours. The next day we went rafting on some BIG waves, and in part of the tour I jumped in the FRIGID water and floated down some rapids which was amazing. We stopped rafting to have lunch at an indigenous village. The village was on a beach of an island and sold necklaces, keychains, and Chocolate (All of which are made on the island with natural materials). The lunch was amazing. It consisted of fresh pineapple, a noodle dish, one bittersweet thing that’s really hard to explain, and chocolate cake. The rest of the rafting was really amazing, and we ended it by going through these Huge rapids while Robin was riding the front like a bucking bronco.

                        

Floating the rapids

Rafting the Jatunyacu River

So much fun!

Post-rapid celebration!

The next day we went to a swimming place called Laguna Azul that had a rope swing, some REALLY cold natural pools, and some live grubbs you could eat that tasted like chicken. While we were on our way out  we realized that we had no way to get back, so we just walked for a while until we hailed a ride in a pickup truck.          

Laguna Azul

Clear, but chilly pools next to the river

                           

Lunch! Choclo, maduros, camarones y chontacuro
                                                                                                                        

                 Chontocuro: Palm weevil larva

                  Better than they look!

The next day we boated to a really cool animal rescue reserve on a covered motorized canoe. The reserve was super neat. It had all kinds of birds, monkeys, mammals, and reptiles. We rode back, I had my algebra class (pretty sure I was the only one in the jungle in that class), and we got out of there on a bus. All in all Tena was really awesome and if you ever have the chance to go there I would really recommend Hostel Pakay.

                                                                                

My first algebra class

                                                                                        

Walking into Tena from Hostal Pakay

Thanks for reading

-Samuel Beesley