Rainforest - Day 3

Today is our last day in the rainforest. Our itinerary includes riding in a motorized canoe up and down the river to visit an animal shelter, an indigenous museum, a ceramic shop, and a balsa wood shop. We started the morning with a delicious breakfast. After we ate, we packed up all our stuff, said goodbye to the lodge and piled into the canoe.

Our first stop was the animal shelter. It consisted of animals that police confiscated at the borders and unwanted pets. There were toucans, macaws, capybaras, monkeys, wild pigs and ocelots. IT WAS AWESOME!

Next, we stopped at an indigenous museum. Here we learned about a variety of traps used by the natives to catch their prey. We also learned and practiced shooting a target with a blow gun. Next we decided to go swimming. I wasn't going to swim until we saw the sweet zipline you could ride into the river. So I decided to take a shot at it. I was third in line to go. When it was my turn, I grabbed the wooden handle and took a leap, in an attempt to avoid a rather large bush at the shoreline. The series of events that occurred in the next 5 seconds went something like this: I jumped, I flew, the handle snapped in half, and I fell... HARD! The fall was about two meters and I landed on my right shoulder. When I stood up it was visibly dislocated. When I tried to move it, it snapped back into place. I was covered in mud and leaves and water. It was rather comical (although nobody else thought so) so I started to laugh. Jenny helped clean me up while Rachel and Susan got me some ibuprofen. It hurt like crazy. After everyone calmed down, I put on my clothes and we all piled back into the canoe for the next stop.

Upon arriving at our final destination of the day we discovered the balsa wood shop was close (the owner was out harvesting more wood) so we went straight to the ceramic shop. There we were shown how they make ceramic bowls using only a campfire. I wasn't really paying attention at this point because I was a bit nauseous due to the pain. But once my ibuprofen kicked in on our ride back to the trucks, I was feeling much better. From where we docked our canoe we took two trucks back to Tena. From Tena we took a public bus to Banos. It took about 3 hours and we were back at the hostal. We went to eat dinner and then went to bed. Tomorrow I go to the hospital to have my shoulder checked out.