Souvenir Photo Studio, by Al Bourassa: Tuesday May 31, 2016 Jungle Boogie Day 2

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Tuesday May 31, 2016

Again, hardly any sleep and no clock to watch. When I finally did get up my watch said 5:30am, my usual waking time these days. I finished off yesterdays Blog and made it to breakfast with everyone at 8am.

We hopped on the bus and departed at 9am for our first official visit to a Shuar jungle village. The Shuar are one of the bush tribes in Ecuador who usually resist any newcomers in their areas. While this evokes images of stone-age natives, this is the modern version, just to put on a show for the gringos. They have their regular clothing underneath the sarong-type clothing and their music comes from a very commercial sound system. They explained some of their welcome rituals, and marked our cheeks with red achiote. Single women had different symbols than married ones. Then a group of them guided us to the nearby Kintia Panki waterfalls. It was cute to see young boys holding onto wobbly older women along the pathway.

The waterfall was quite nice and the senior tribesmen again did rituals to the waterfall gods. A few gringos swam under the falls too.

When we walked back to the village where they did some dances for us and they showed us some jewelry made from local plants that they had for sale at reasonable prices. So Cristina got herself more earrings, a necklace and a fur bracelet. It was all a hokey setup but still interesting and enjoyable at the same time. I have some good videos too but they will have to wait until I can process them properly, sorry.

Then we went into town and had lunch at a Mexiacn restaurant. Even though all the food was pre-ordered it still took them a while to serve everyone. The food was tasty enough that we planned to return there for supper.

We came back to the Luzcelinda and I immediately headed for the hottub and pool even though it was spitting rain. Then I discovered that they had a steam room but they had no gas hooked up to it so they remedied that within a 1/2 hour and a bunch of us enjoyed a good steam.

Then I came to the room and tried to batch edit my stack of today's photos but couldn't get anything to work, ugh..... so I had to return to doing every single one. I couldn't finish them all before we had to board the bus again at 6pm to head out for supper.

We were really surprised when our bus got hung up under the small roof over the gate! We had been through there before a few times without any problems.... So they moved everyone to the back of the bus and made it through.

They were stopping at an Italian restaurant and wew ere going to pass on that until I saw the word pizza on their sign. So we decided quickly on a medium meat-lovers' pizza and ordered first. We were shocked when we had the pizza in front of us about 15 minutes later,... and it was darn good pizza! So we had a little time to wander around the center of the town until it started to rain, then we headed back to the bus.

The return to the Luzcelinda was an event when the bus wrenched off the little roof over the gate this time and they had to bring in a backhoe to help lift it up so the bus could get through. However, one the bus passed, the attempt to re-position the roof went awry and it crashed down onto the gates. That was when I called it a night so I could finish all these photos and get to bed. We have an early morning jaunt to prepare for...

I hope you enjoy the photos. I got some really interesting shots today so I have saved all the RAW files so that I can revisit them and process them better when I am back on my PC. That was the day's excitement, Cheers, Al

NOTE that you may click on any photo for an ENLARGED VIEW.