Jungle Hike

Sadly, today was my last activity with the school. Tomorrow I head to the orphanage (which I'm pretty much terrified about at the moment). Luckily, I'm leaving the school with a bang because today was totally awesome. First of all, I cooked lunch for everybody at the school. One of the teacher's had mentioned to me in conversation one time about not liking eggplant. I had told her that was because she had never had my eggplant parm before. She had no clue what eggplant parm was! (Italian food isn't very popular here.) It was the same with both of my teachers, so I went ahead and made a big tray for everyone. I couldn't find eggplants in the supermarket, so my teacher brought me to the market. Generally speaking, the supermarkets don't really have a large selection of fresh items, it's mostly for just buying packaged goods. Fruits, vegetables and meats are usually purchased from the big market in Antigua. I had been to the market before but hadn't really seen much in the way of vegetables. I explained this to Hugo and after a bit of a conversation I realized that I had never actually been INSIDE the market, just outside where the overflow is. He took me inside and I was totally floored. This place was ENORMOUS. I'm talking probably two hundred stalls, if not more; fresh fruits, vegetables, spices and grains everywhere you looked. It was so amazing! I was SO disappointed that I hadn't known about this place sooner.

So our activity today was to a place called El Paraiso Azul (the Blue Paradise). All I knew about it was that it was some kind of bird sanctuary. I figured we'd walk around a few cages and see different types of parrots and stuff. Turns out it was a two mile hike through the jungle! It was totally awesome (despite me being completely unprepared).

Here's all of us getting ready to start the hike (My friend Tamra's taking the pic) The girl all the way to the left is Stephanie. She's going to be a volunteer at NPH with me for the next year.

Okay, so I've never really spent much time in the jungle before (I rode a bus through one in Belize once but it was just a drive-by). I was a little enthralled, as you can probably tell from all the random videos I shot. But hey, I figured all my family and friends would get a real kick out of seeing this! (Ignore my inappropriate comments during the last video)





The way the trail was set up, you walk through relatively flat land until you're pretty deep inside the woods, then they have a pretty impressive series of wooden stairs that zig zag up the mountain side. We were all hurting by the time we got up to the top, but it was worth the pain.

And here's the view from the top. They had a nice little bench built up there, it was really beautiful. We actually didn't see or hear any birds the whole day, but it was a great hike.