THE AMAZON!!

OK I know I haven't kept up with my blog during the last couple of weeks, but I have great excuses. Not only did I take two trips to the Amazon, but Evan came to Peru for a week!!! Now, I have only 5 days left of this life-changing journey and I'm both excited and sad to be returning to the US. Because I'm so short on time I'm going to keep this post short, but enjoy the photos!!

My first Amazon trip was with my entire group to Iquitos, a city in northern Peru that's on the Amazon River. Here are some of my life goals that I accomplished there:
1. Going skinny-dipping with 14 of my favorite people in the Amazon River!!!
2. Staying in a jungle hut without electricity and having to use kerosene lamps to wander around at night.
3. Learning how to shoot a blowgun with local tribe people.
4. Getting repeatedly yelled at by our stiff and angry guide (literally 5 times a day for 3 days) for doing things such as asking a friend how to say something in Spanish and playing with little Peruvian kids instead of listening to his boring speeches.
5. Watching our guide get attacked by a fer de lance snake, but having him kill it with a machete before it got his leg. (Fer de lance bite = 3 hours to live if you can't reach a doctor)
6. Fishing for piranhas in the Amazon river.
7. Talking to little girls that live in an jungle village about their school and letting them take photos of each other with my camera.
8. Being 1 foot away from an Anaconda.
9. Lazily spending the afternoons in hammocks by the river.
10. Climbing wooden rafters in an attempt to act like monkeys, and then falling off of them very awkwardly.

My second Amazon trip was with my other half!!! Evan and I went to the south of Peru near the Bolivian border to a town called Puerto Maldonado. From there, we headed to the Tambopata Reserve to a lodge called Explorer's Inn in the middle of the jungle. Despite lots of rain and it actually being freezing, we had so much fun! We did tons of hiking, which involved heavy duty boots and us wading through deep puddles of mud for about 7 hours. We saw red howler monkeys, caimins, and macaws and we got to eat Brazil nuts and anisthetic leaves (which left our tongues numb for about 30 minutes) right off the rainforest trees! I don't think I've ever been that dirty for a 3 day period in my entire life. Yay for twin bonding!!!!