Paseo de Los Monos.

I find it irritating that if I manage to get my hands on a computer that has functional Skype, then it won´t read my camera. If it has Skype and the camera works, then there´s something wrong with Flickr. Christ. Anyway, I´ve spent the better part of the last hour clicking on ¨acciones¨ in Flickr in the attempt to update my photos. It didn´t work. NOT MY FAULT!

Anyway, fuck that. I´ll just tell you what I´ve been doing for the last week.

In an attempt to re-live my days at Yassi, I went in search of some volunteer work in the Ecuadorian jungle, and came upon a little town called Puyo with a monkey rescue center in need of help. Kind of. I think they mostly take on volunteers to make sure that there are other moving objects around for the monkeys to bite and poo on. I´m not sure what to say about this except that this is one of the best things I´ve ever done traveling. I´m not sure if it knocks Yassi out of the water... but it really makes me reevaluate my time there. No cages, hardly--- more contact, more kisses, and unfortunately, more poop. I´ve been crapped on so many times in the past week that when I awoke this morning in my hostel in Baños, I was alarmed that I wasn´t immediately welcomed into my waking state by the stench of shit.

I spent about a week constructing a giant cage, preparing food, and fending off a crazed capuchin that made ripping out my ACL his number one priority in life. He managed to get a pretty good chunk out of my right leg before I punched him with a piece of corn right on the eye. Beating things up with corn is not a good idea. First they will bite you. Then they will eat the corn. It´s very lose-lose.

Ecuador has been pretty good so far. It´s not the kind of place that makes me go ¨oh my god, I wish I was dead because my brain can´t handle all this awesomeness¨.... but it´s a good medium between Peru and Colombia. There are also decent movies playing on the buses here. The Spanish version of Jaden Smith´s ¨Karate Kid¨? An excellent way to pass the 2 hour ride from Baños to Puyo. All three times that I did it. I also got to do some kick-ass Level 3 rafting yesterday for about 10 bucks. Not bad.

One thing that DOES suck is the complete lack of competency of the bus companies here. Christ, even Peru was better. So... I was planning to leave Baños on Sunday night... never mind how hung over I was from Saturday... to make sure I could get to Montañita with time to spare before my birthday. I bought a ticket for 30 minutes past ten at night. I arrive at thirty past ten and proceed to wait for something like an hour and a half for a bus that apparently took off on time. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN SOUTH AMERICAN HISTORY. The bus company refused to transfer my ticket to the next day, so I bought yet another ticket, deciding to swallow my irritation, because... after all, I should have been early. The following day, Nadine and I head down to the station half an hour early so as not to miss the bus (again). Upon our arrival at a bit before ten, we get accosted by a man who starts shouting at us to ¨Sube! Sube! Sube!¨our bus so it could take off half an hour early. I wasn´t even fully in before the driver started plowing down the road at a vomit-inducing speed. Nevertheless, Nadine and I tucked ourselves into our seats, snuggled up with some pashminas and jackets, and fell asleep.

Roughly an hour later, we´re told to ¨Baja! Baja!¨... since our bus is apparently dumping us on another bus headed the same direction, as OUR bus company couldn´t be buggered to actually TAKE us where they were supposed to. Happily, this bus is marvelously empty, and Nadine takes three seats while I take two, and for almost 3 hours, she dozes peacefully, burritoed in her sleeping bag while I shiver and mutter as much profanity as can escape my frost-covered lips. When I finally manage to get to sleep (emptying my purse and using it as a potato-sack-like device to cover my legs), we´re awoken AGAIN and told to get the fuck down, as THIS bus is apparently experiencing technical difficulties. Our final bus is the closest thing I can compare to an outhouse on wheels. I´m too tired by this point to protest, and I manage to fall asleep in the lap of the teenage girl seated next to me.

An hour after that, we´re then told to get down so we can submit ourselves to the police check. Getting frisked by jackasses with batons was the least-crappy part of this trip.

Then we arrived in Guayaquil.

Fuck, this post is taking me entirely too long. Let me just sum up my birthday so that this doesn´t end up being a freakin´novella. My birthday was excellent. I partied. Very... very hard. Unfortunately, this alleged partying didn´t involve Quito Fest, and didn´t involve other English-speakers. While Argentinians are impossible to understand by day... by night, nobody gives a fuck and it all comes down to how many shots you can take. A silly civil uprising delayed my plans to spend my big day on a bus (with visions of whales swimming in my head), and I didn´t get to Quito until Saturday morning... just in time to find out that Quito Fest was cancelled. I wont´go into too much detail... but I decided to just get obliterated and it ended up being a pretty decent alternative. I suppose that´s all.

Fuck I need to update this blog more frequently because now it doesn´t make any sense at all. Oh, but I should boast that the ¨Cambodia¨and ¨Myanmar¨tabs up top have been updated.... erm... half a year late. Oops!

Oh, by the way--- I know there´s like, no photos on this post, but I haven´t uploaded them yet. I´ll get around to it!