Home » Ecuador » La Amazonía: The Village of Wachimak

My time in the amazon was easily the most extraordinary time of my life. nothing that i have ever done can compare to that time in adventure, uniqueness, and pure incredibleness . . . i imagine that this is what travel was like 100 years ago. there were many times that i felt like a national geographic explorer truly discovering the ways of the ecuadorian amazon.

La Amazonía: The Village of Wachimak

Andy Wunder
2007-04-19 22:35:13

Displayed times (last time: )

after 1 week i began to feel this incredible urge to have a real conversation with someone other than myself. i wanted to hear english from someone other than the music on my ipod (and i even had to ration the battery on that). it was something that i never expected to have to deal with. going 2 weeks with out english or any true communication became a very difficult thing for me. even if i was able to converse fluently with the people of wachimak, would we still have been able to understand each other? it was an isolation from all that i knew, from all that was comfortable and familiar. and just as their lifestyle and ways were foreign to me, i was an alien to them. they had no idea what to make of my ipod. however, i dont want you to misunderstand. i would have had it no other way. that was what it was about.

for me, the westerner raised on a different way of living, it became tiring bathing in a river, eating armadillo, and swatting the bugs off my legs that ate them to pieces (when they say wear boots, wear the damn boots). things that were romantic in the begin quickly lost their appeal. with a few days left i began to get really excited to go back to civilization. i began to crave a real conversation, a shower, and the internet. i wanted to be able to eat a hamburger or a pizza and drink a cold coke (to be honest anything cold ... with the exception of the lunch i had at the market, i didnt have a cold drink my whole time in wachimak). i wanted the "comforts" that i had left. as soon as i returned to tena i checked into one of the nicer rooms that i stayed in in south america. it had ac and tv with english channels. i took a long long hot shower and brought all my bags into the shower with me. i was determined to kill every last bug that was determined to eat my leg. one thing about my return to civilization that i thought was ironic was the food. i had been dying for that pizza and cold coke for the whole 2 weeks. when i finally got dinner and ordered ...