Day 7. Into The Jungle.

We woke up the next morning very early and it still took us awhile to get going. I'll tell you now, not once did we get on the trails when we were suppose to. haha We had a lovely breakfast and even got to see some student head off to school. The education part of the team, Adrianna, Mark, Doc and Kat were busy trying to get interviews with some local students about their thoughts on the school before we left. When we finally got moving we were stopped by a local man who was selling jewelry. He presented the 4 youth ambassadors with rings made of coconut to show the community's appreciation for what we are doing for them. A lot of people ended up buying some pretty amazing things. Sierra bought a jaguar tooth necklace! I ended up traded the angle pin Baba gave me before I left for a frog necklace "for luck" (I gave it to Baba when I got back and she loved it!) and I also bought a bracelet. Once we finally got on our way we left for the deep jungle. We had everything packed up to stay in the jungle for two nights and left it with the Bomberos who would be meeting us in two trucks to take us into the deep jungle. It was too far to hike the entire distance; we would have ended up hiking in the dark. We walked along the beach for awhile and ended up at a river crossing where the trucks were waiting. It was absolutely scorching in the sun so it was nice to get in an air conditioned car. We drove to a store near by to restock on some food that we would need for the jungle nights. Lots of cookies, chips and crackers. We ate a lot of "junk" food for calorie purposes since we weren't stopping for lunch during the day and our dinners didn't contain many calories. The lady who owned the store probably was scared to death of us since we had practically an army with us! Also, we probably spent enough money in her store for her to take a trip to the Bahamas. haha After we restocked everything we headed our for quite a drive where the Bomberos dropped us off to start our hike. This hike wasn't very difficult, but it seemed hard for some reason because the previous day we didn't do much, it was like a rest. The youth ambassadors had a horrible habit of asking "how much further?" so Shirley decided to trick us. She told us we had about 2 hours or some sort of outrageous amount of time left so we put our heads down a trucked it trying to get to our campsite before dark, which would have been a HUGE problem. I'm not gonna lie, when she mentioned that it was potential we might be walking in the dark I did get nervous. At night is when the jungle comes alive and I was not about to be waltzing around running into jaguars and other dangerous animals! Anyways, we were really making good time and before we knew it we were at the campsite. It defiantly didn't take us 2 hours, more like 20 minutes. Shirley sneak attacked us so that we thought it was much further than it was so we would get there faster! We all died when we saw camp, so happy to be there! We had to hangout until the Bomberos got there with our camping stuff for the night. They drove the truck right up to the campsite so that in case of an emergency we had a quick way out. There were plenty of trees to string out hammocks up on, but many of them were very tiny and with 4 people to each little tree just calls for disaster. Doc's hammock took down one of the trees and Shirley's hammock with it. At one point I heard some parrots (Macaws) and looked up and got to see 3 flying overhead. This was the only animal that I absolutely needed to see coming to the Amazon! As soon as the sun went down the forest really did come alive. Insects that are probably the size of a grape were making siren noises and you could hear the howler monkeys plain as day. The monkeys sound like a jet engine about to take off (that was the analogy that Jessi used). That night we ate our first dehydrated meal. I though it was disgusting, but hey it was food. After dinner we all hung out and talked and played the game two truths and a lie. That game is a ton of fun when you play with people you don't know, especially all the people in our group since everyone is so interesting! I got tired real fast that night and crawled into my hammock praying that I could fall asleep with all the loud noises. It started to thunder in the middle of the night so I grabbed a tarp I had in my bag and put it over top of my mosquito net just in case it were to rain. Sleeping in the jungle was such a crazy experience because I know I'll probably never get the opportunity to do anything like that again. Amazing.